This year's winners of the eVolo Skyscraper Competition have been announced. Featuring fantastical skyscraper designs, highlights include rotating affordable housing, an ocean-cleaning plastic skyscraper, and tree-like towers to help keep watch over the Amazon rainforest.
The eVolo Skyscraper Competition doesn't concern itself with mundane practicalities like planning permission, building cost, budget or safety, but is laser-focused on highlighting interesting ideas and sparking the imagination. There's no official overriding theme this year, but the specter of climate change looms large.
"eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Skyscraper Competition," said eVolo. "The Jury selected 3 winners and 15 honorable mentions from 309 projects received. The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments."
This year's three winners are showcased below, but be sure to take a look at the runners-up in the gallery, including an eclectic mixture of skyscrapers that float, fold, farm and more.
This year's eVolo Skyscraper Competition winner is Nomad Metropolises, by China's Chufeng Wu, Chang Lu, Bozhi Zheng, Duo Wang and Shuxiao Zhang.
The Nomad Metropolises imagines vertical cities made up of affordable housing. Modularity and flexibility would be the key focus and their rotating form would allow a home to take up a smaller physical footprint than usual. A central capsule would contain areas such as a kitchen and bathroom, while the other living areas would be placed on four sides of the rotatable part, which users could customize as necessary.
The Ocean Re-clamation Skyscraper, by New Zealand's Dennis Byun, Harry Tse and Sunjoo Lee came in second place.
As its name suggests, the proposal envisions reclaiming the oceans for nature. It would tackle environmental disasters such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and would be built from recycled plastic itself sourced from ocean waste. It would also move around the oceans to recycle pollution using an outer ring as a suction port and a complicated system of filters and recycling technology.
Third place went to K8 Forest Lift Off, by Germany pair Ahmad Hafez and Hamzeh Al-Thweib.
This design looks to the Amazon rainforest and is inspired by the Kapok tree depicted in the children's book The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rainforest, by Lynne Cherry. It would create multiple towers shaped like trees, with each one including an underground water reservoir, huge amounts of soil and greenery. The buildings would also incorporate a complex system of drones to help prevent forest fires, as well as monitoring the surrounding forest, ecosystems and local animal life.
Source: eVolo
