The winners of the 2024 eVolo Skyscraper Competition have been revealed. Featuring 17 fantastical high-rise designs that range from the unlikely to the impossible, the competition offers a fascinating look at architectural ideas unconstrained by practical concerns.
As was the case last year, there's no official overriding theme to the 2024 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, though themes on climate change and war loom large.
"The Jury selected 3 winners and 14 honorable mentions from 206 projects received," explains eVolo Magazine. "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."
We've highlighted the three winners below, but be sure to take a look at the 14 runners-up in the the gallery, which include a glacial skyscraper for the Himalayas and a cluster of towers that would protect Japan from tsunamis and other disasters.
This year's eVolo Skyscraper Competition winner is Urban Intercropping, by China's Penghao Zhao, Hanyu Sun, Sinuo Jia, Jingxuan Li, Songping Jing, Yibo Gao, YuJie Zeng and An Jiang.
The Urban Intercropping project addresses what its designers say is a growing separation between urban areas and agriculture. The idea, then, is to create a number of skyscrapers inspired by intercropping planting techniques to maximize space, light energy, and resources in the city. The towers would include greenhouses for growing food, alongside living areas and excellent public transportation systems.
The Streamline Concerto, by Jianwei Zhu , Haoyu Liu Yi Liu and Yanchu Liang, again from China, won second place.
The proposal focuses on the environmental challenges and potential flooding of China's Yellow River, addressing soil erosion upstream and other issues. More of a "landscraper" like the Line than a typical tall building, it would follow the river's snaking path and, after three 50-year cycles focused on environmental regeneration, would blend into the surrounding nature, blocking sandstorms and preventing flooding from occurring.
Third place went to the Ocean Lungs Skyscraper, which was created by a very large Egyptian team made up of Mohammed Noeman Coutry, AbdelRahman Mahmoud Badawy, Toka Hassan Taman, Amr Khaled Mahmoud AbdElsstar, Hend Mahmoud Hassan Rashad, Menna Tallah Mahmoud Fouad, Mohamed Mahfouz Abdelaziz Abdelwadoud, Nagwa Khaled Mohamed Mohamed, Norhan Mohammed Abdel-Hamid Abdel-monem and Omar Ahmed Salah Mohamed.
This design imagines what would be the world's tallest skyscraper, with a height of 1,000 m (3,280 ft). However, instead of soaring into the sky it would float on water and plunge beneath the waves. Its entire structure would be covered in a series of special filters that would clean the world's oceans from CO2 and other pollutants.
Source: eVolo Skyscraper Competition
