Arch Tracker

The annual Skyscraper Competition organized by eVolo has become an important architectural prize with high media attention. The 2008 edition was published by more than ten architecture an design magazines and by several news, fashion and art publications. The eVolo Book has recived excellent reviews and has been included in the catalog for the Book Expo America, Frankfurt Book Fair and Beijing Book Fair.

For the 2009 edition eVolo invites architects, engineers and designers to explore new ideas and concepts for vertical density. Skyscrapers have been springing up in fast-developing countries without careful consideration of the urban fabric, environmental effects and quality of life. The 2009 competition calls for innovative designs that take into consideration the historical and social context, the existing urban fabric, the human scale and the environment.

We recived 416 projects from 64 different countries. We would like to thank everyone who made possible this competition specially the participants whose thirst for innovation is shaping for the 21st century.

During the summer of 2009 there will be an exhibition with the best projects of the 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 Skyscraper Competition in New York City.

This edition had 3 winners and 15 special mentions.
Winners:
Kyu Ho Chun, Kenta Fukunishi, Jae Young Lee
1st place – 09 Skyscraper Competition
Location: Journal Square, Jersey City
Project Scope: Structural engineering Architecture
Project Type: High-rise building with transportation hub and reservoir

Due to various human activities and overwhelming usage of natural resources, pollution level drastically increased in 21st century. In the year of 2050, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) declares that it is not safe to breathe in outdoor air without proper filtering aid device. A group of Architects, Engineers, Scientists and Developers started to collaborate to find more desirable solution in contaminated outdoor air condition. The primary solution is called ‘NEO ARC’, the green architecture.

The NEO ARC incorporates mixed-use residential and commercial space with a major transportation hub. It integrates green technologies such as, solar panels that produce electricity, rain water collection that is filtered by plants and soils and then generates oxygen and hydrogen. Hyper performance Facade channels rain water into designated rain water storage, where ultraviolet light filament-powered by thin film photovoltaic on the surface–purifies the water. The façade of the building is a hyper-efficient and rigorous structure that provides thermal mass for insulation and shade for residents. The building typology is a continuous landscape being extruded and responded to an adaptation of the environment. Spaces of the building are generated by the deformed surfaces that play an important role in providing an optimizing shelter for both nature and human beings. In-filled soils and water in the space will filter the rain water and offer the inhabitable ground to people. Purified water is delivered and stored in designated water storage in different level for daily use as well as the water reservoir that located at very bottom of the building. Stored water inside of building not only contributes to the performance of building but also becomes important resources to produce clean air, hydrogen gas and potable water in 2050.

In water storages, water molecules are decomposed into Oxygen and Hydrogen by electrolysis of water. In 2050, petroleum is depleted and Hydrogen technology is expanded to all types of transportation. Decomposed hydrogen from water will be used for public transportation such as train, bus and private cars owned by residents. Moreover, it will be delivered with Oxygen through cavity cable embedded in train tracks to Manhattan. Eventually NEO ARC becomes a lung for the city that provides clean air and resources.

Neo Arc has different level of intensity changes of façade. As the level of intensity increase, spaces behind façade also change from public spaces to private spaces. The scale change of tessellation of triangulation is responded to the intensification of façade as well as major and minor structure, water channeling, and glazing systems. Residential and office space is the most private space where ecological life between people and nature are provided. Cultural space is for the social network and interactions in between neighbors and community members.

Nicola Marchi – Adelaïde Marchi
2nd place – 09 Skyscraper Competition
The living bridge
Michel Etienne Turgot, Borough President of the City of Paris in 1734, commissioned to the drafter Louis Bretez the most beautiful and accurate representation of Paris in the “Ancien Régime”.
Based on this representation, it is evident that most bridges in the City at that time are living quarters and perform as actual buildings, fully integrated to the bridge itself.

The same typology is found in the historic “Ponte Vecchio” in Florence that survives unaltered to this date, with its direct relationship between “bridge architecture” and the river.

The center of Paris is deeply characterized by the extraordinary presence of the Seine River, touching the historic monuments such as the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Grande Palais. These are all landmarks that provide orientation in the city, as authentic milestones.

The historic city can still develop and grow its density vertically, respecting and highlighting the existing context.

The grand open spaces of Paris, and particularly the Place de la Concorde, have the potential of integrating the new 400-meter high building, made of two narrow (12 meter) and long (216 meter) volumes, separated by 30 meter space. The building is integrated by the Seine, becoming a new landmark and offering to the historic center the development of the most varied programmatic elements, from landscape to culture, museum and performance spaces.

The new bridge for the city is a living one.

Eric Vergne
3rd place – 09 Skyscraper Competition

In the Hudson Yard area of Manhattan, this urban high rise farm introduces inherently political opposing elements; farmers (producers) and New Yorkers (consumers) through farms, workers housing, and market places.  Through the mixing of politically opposing classes, social and cultural confrontations are generated within a high rise typology by introducing producers of biomass into the city, a place of historic biomass consumption.  In so doing, the high rise is re-defined not by efficiency, but rather through the use of surfaces to orchestrate the dynamic programmatic interactions and the multiplicity of spatial organization they suppose.  The essence of these social/political programmatic relationships is unclear. The spaces they create are lived not represented (or conceived).  One can only speculate on the range of lived relationships and oppositions that might form within and around this urban farm.  Through food production and consumption, this skyscraper sets up a fluctuation of varying densities and collections of people, bringing together different social and cultural groups, creating new and unforeseen urban experiences that form and dissipate within the flux of city life.  By defining programs, this tower does not seek to control and manipulate interaction between politically dynamic groups of farmers and consumers, but rather give a place for the acting out of a multiplicity of outcomes.  Program is merely a  given caricature not a dictated function.  The interior surfaces  do not prescribe function but merely hint at a potential.  It is up to the everyday users to define that outcome of the space they inhabit given the environment they inherit.

In this urban high rise farm, the romanticizing of modern food production or utopian garden city additions are rejected. Rather, if farming is truly able to provide adequately for a city, a dystopian stage of agricultural production which uses mans control over the growth process, must be accepted.  This project accepts genetic engineering, airoponic watering and nutrient technologies (a method of spraying plant roots with needed solutions), and controlled lighting and CO2 levels (to maximize plant growth and food production).  The tower takes into consideration the different stages of plant production; cloning, vegetative stage and flowering stage to maximize food production as much as possible.  In addition it is assumed that genetically engineered plants will be bread to maximize both the nutitianal value and production of the crops within the tower.  Genetic engineering is controversial but necessary if the tower is to accommodate Manhattan’s food production needs.  It is projected that multiple towers will be needed to meet manhattans food production needs.  Accordingly a new type of city dweller is created, the nomadic worker, who moves throughout the city tending its food production needs and resisting and reversing the suburbanization of Manhattan.

Looking at density (building height), value of land, underdevelopment in relation to deviation from the perfect market and relation to maximum zoning allowance, as well as existing urban markets throughout Manhattan, several optimum sites for urban farms were chosen. Given the planed high profile nature and the dramatic increase in density of the Hudson Yard area development,  it was chosen as the flagship of Manhattan urban farms.

This projects investigation draws on the material logic of plant mechanics.    The plant cells of ferns have  evolved bio-mechanical configurations which maximize strength while minimizing material.  Using these attributes, analogue models were created investigating a new structural system for high rise construction that allows for dynamic interior spaces.

Applying non-linear programmatic rules to the functions of an urban farm, this project investigates how self-organizing computation can be used to organize programmatic elements.  Each programmatic element was given a set of simple rules which encompassed its conceptual and contextual needs, resulting in a complex fluctuating system.  This system already had inherent political opposition; farmers and farms (producers) and New Yorkers and markets (consumers).  Accordingly, how the program organized itself within the computer always had inherent cultural and social dynamics.  The organization of the program, within a skyscraper, brought these politically charged programs into varying degrees of confrontation and organization.

Breaking down the structural mechanics of the spinal cord in to basic compression and tension members, an adaptive structure was created to support the  elevator core, which borrows its variability from roller coaster design.

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