My previous post, 10 Mega-Construction Projects That Could Save the Environment - and the Economy, presented 10 futuristic mega projects that are designed to address environmental (and economic) issues. Here’s a selection of 15 more of such architectural designs.
These designs are those of the three winners and 12 honourable mentions (selected from 22) from the eVolo Magazine's 2012 Skyscraper Competition, an architecture competition which highlights futuristic - and greener - skyscraper designs. Just like the projects in my previous post, the exceptionally innovative skyscraper designs are indeed mind-boggling. (The honourable mentions are in no particular order)
15 Mind-Boggling Next Generation Skyscrapers For A Greener Future
The next generation of skyscrapers might include giant spheres that float in the ocean, organic-looking patches that lean against mountainsides or icy towers in the Himalayas, according to one architecture competition's winning designs. eVolo, a design and architecture magazine, posted the winners of its annual Skyscrapers Competition on 2 March 2012.
The competition is a forum for sky-high dreams. "There are no restrictions in regards to site, program or size," according to eVolo's call for submissions. "The objective is to provide maximum freedom to the participants to engage the project without constraints in the most creative way." The results are some decidedly futuristic designs. Many depend on technologies that don't yet exist, but scientists are working on them. All try to solve environmental or social justice problems their designers think will be important in the future.
15. Floating City
Honourable Mention: Floating City by Wei Zhao of China.
天上人间 (Tian-shan-ren-jian – Heaven and Earth) is the physical manifestation of the traditional Shanshui painting, which aims to reach the ideal lifestyle.
Earth, with 7 billion people, is continuously increasing her load with three new babies born every second. With limited resources, the rapid growth of population has caused many problems included environmental degradation, ocean acidification, ozone holes, lack of fresh water, and constant loss of biodiversity.
The “Heaven and Earth” project is a utopia wonderland residing in the air. There are mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, and animals. It solves the problems that exist on Earth, including food, water, and housing.
14. Tehran Tower
Honourable Mention: Tehran Tower by Mahdi Kamboozia, Alireza Esfandiari, Nima Dehghani, and
Mohammad Ashkbar Sefat of Iran.
Tehran, Iran’s largest city and its capital, is plagued by extreme air pollution, 80% of which is caused by auto traffic. Amongst its 8.5 million residents, it is estimated that 27 people die daily from pollution-related diseases, showing the tangible and deadly dangers that result from the traffic caused by urban sprawl. To combat this reality, the designers of the Tehran Tower propose building up, locating massive skyscrapers within Tehran to house masses of residents centrally.
Demolishing unimportant old buildings will create space both for the two legs of the large tower, which is connected above ground to create a wide building expanse, and for green space that will make the urban expanse as a whole more liveable. By designing a tower with two legs that connect above ground, precious land is saved from development: the skyscraper occupies just 1,200 square meters of land versus the 30,000 square meters a typical tower would need for development. Each tower provides 1,200 housing units.
13. Oceanscraper
Honourable Mention: Oceanscraper by Hui Chen of China and Luying Guo of United States.
Constructing a building that floats in the ocean has inherent benefits, the main boon being buoyancy. Locating a structure in the sea allows the possibility for massive complexes to be constructed without the restraints of gravity, opening possibilities for great architectural experimentation.
Enter “Oceanscraper,” a design for a cone-shaped underwater city complex. The Oceanscraper has a large “bowl” in the centre to allow daylight to reach the depths; surrounding the bowl is a ring of living space. Submarines dock into the living space, and residents remain inside, creating a community of submarine apartments. This mobility affords freedom for residents and also allows each city complex to shift rapidly, if need be. Submarines are free to navigate both within the bowl and outside of the complex, and can dock collectively in themed groups, such as submarines that are performing research, or those that are hosting tourist groups, etc.
12. GreenGru Airportscraper
Honourable Mention: GreenGru Airportscraper by Gerasimos Pavlidis of Greece.
Inspired by the towering cranes found in big cities, the 380 meter-tall GreenGru skyscraper provides public transportation via air to residents of metropolises with traffic problems or airports located far from the core. It also works as an energy station, generating enough power from within to run its own systems and light up some of the surrounding city as well.
The building’s name capitalizes on the energy creation inside, a process the designer’s have dubbed “Artificial Photosynthesis Installation,” explaining the “green.” “Gru” is the Italian translation of “tower crane,” the basis of its look.
The tower’s mast is made of carbon-nanotube-reinforced steel, with large concrete counterweights underground for stabilization. The building’s façade, inspired by twisted rubber bands, is made of graphite, which is ten times stronger and six times lighter than steel. The graphite is covered in a polymeric carbon dioxide-absorber called zeolight, which lowers carbon dioxide levels during the night; sunlight exposure during the day allows the molecules to float away. This means the exterior of the building creates a greenhouse effect inside, making the environment excellent for growing plants.
11. Tundra City
Honourable Mention: Tundra City by Pavel Sipkin of Russia.
Tundra City is located in the exhausted diamond mine “Lucky” which is the geographical centre of the entire Russian Tundra – the last point of urbanization of the Russian North.
The tundra is an unexplored region, which hardly anyone wants to go. It is associated with a “hole” due to poor living conditions. The Russian government has paid attention to the prospect and huge potential benefits of developing the region to the whole the country. This has been facilitated by the existing geopolitical threat posed by the rapidly development of China, India, and other countries.
Tundra City is a launching pad to address the problems of the region: population, development of infrastructure, creation of new industry, agriculture, science, and culture.
10. Noah’s Ark: Sustainable City
Honourable Mention: Noah’s Ark: Sustainable City by Aleksandar Joksimovic and Jelena Nikolic of Serbia.
Noah’s Ark is a self-sustainable city on the water that can support all living species, from humans to animals and fish to plants and trees, that have been evicted from land by natural disasters, warfare, whatever disasters the end days may bring. In addition to providing protection from these disasters, the Ark concept also addresses overcrowding on land: 72% of the earth’s surface is already covered by water, so extension of the urban city grid onto water is both logical and useful, as solar, wind and wave energies are easily captured at sea, and it is these natural energy sources that will power the development.
It is designed as part of a network consisting of other Arks, which connect with floating underwater tunnels and the main land. As the settlements grow, the Arks can attach to each other, creating one big artificial mainland from a series of artificial islands.
9. Aakash Skyscraper
Honourable Mention: Aakash Skyscraper by Lemire Abdul Halim Chehab, Suraj Ramkumar Suthar and
Swapnil Sanjay Gawande of the United Kingdom.
Aakash, the Hindi word for “sky,” provides the inspiration for this project, which proposes locating floating clusters of development high in the skies above Mumbai, one of the world’s most congested metropolises.
The complex as a whole is comprised of tree-like structures that stem at nodes throughout the city, grow into the sky and then branch out into wide, floating modules that connect to create a road-less cityscape. The majority of the structural load is taken by cloud-shaped helium balloons; only some of the load is transferred to the ground by means of nodes.
8. Plastic Fish Tower
Honourable Mention: Plastic Fish Tower by Kim Hongseop, Cho Hyunbeom, Yoon Sunhee and Yoon
Hyungsoo of South Korea.
Also called Giant Plastic-Cleaning Residential Ball for the Pacific Ocean. Just as you might drop a water-purifying tablet into some river water scooped up during a camping trip, this ball-shaped building is designed to get dropped in the Pacific Ocean, where it would float and clean the water of discarded plastic. A fence with a diameter of 1 kilometre would capture plastic that washes by. A facility inside the ball recycles the plastic into fish-farm structures to nurse endangered fish populations. And people could live and play in spaces in the opaque white struts around the ball.
The designers hope the ball will be a tourist attraction, according to the magazine.
7. House of Babel: Post-Crisis Skyscraper
Honourable Mention: House of Babel: Post-Crisis Skyscraper by Nikita Asadov of Russia.
The race between countries, cities, and corporations to construct the highest structure is a challenge of pride and power. Our technological advances allowed for the construction of super-tall buildings – the higher they are, the more space they loose and the harder the engineering challenge becomes. The global financial crisis was the last decisive argument against such structures.
The House of Babel offers a radical revision for the common method of building a traditional home. With the help of aerostatic construction we can eliminate extra floors and elevate the building to almost any desired height. The post-crisis skyscraper is the house consisting of two floors connected with a high-speed elevator on a thin heavy-duty cable.
6. Migrant Skyscraper
Honourable Mention: Migrant Skyscraper by Damian Przybyla and Rafal Przybyla of Poland.
The “Migrant Skyscraper” or The Rolling Family Farm is literally mobile: A giant, thin tire with a building and green space in the centre, this skyscraper is ready to roll.
But can it outrun zombies? This design holds self-sufficient buildings inside a giant, rolling tire, so residents can simply cruise away whenever natural or political disasters hit, taking crops, livestock, housing units and a water-recycling system with them. Each wheel can support one family.
5. Folded City
Honourable Mention: Folded City by Adrien Piebourg and Bastien Papetti of France.
How to live vertically? Building higher and higher does not seem to change the way we live. Most people wish to live in single-family residences, but the problem is the lack of diversity and density. How to have the benefits of suburbia combined with the intensity of living in the city?
The history of the skyscrapers goes back to Elisha Otis, who invented the elevator in the 19th century. This invention promoted the conquest of the sky with projects competing for prowess and size. What would happened if within a house the elevator is used as a remote control to move from one floor to another, from one program to another?
This new “object” would challenge the function of living. The house becomes smart and incorporates multiple applications - one application per floor. The elevator is for the house what that Internet is for a smart-phone. A necessary parameter! Now you can “zap” your life spatially. Imagine yourself in your room, put on your slippers, go in your elevator, and zap! You will be in your living room, your garage, your favourite bar or business place; the park where you go jogging!
4. Citadel Skyscraper
Honourable Mention: Citadel Skyscraper by Victor Kopieikin and Pavlo Zabotin of Ukraine.
Natural disasters, the threat of technological meltdown and even the possibility of visitors from space all present a need for cities and even countries to reorganize to implement infrastructure that can protect people from possible catastrophes.
The “Citadel Skyscraper” project is imagined for Japan because of the numerous natural and manmade disasters that have struck the region in recent years. The project proposes a three-part implementation of new structures with an end result of protecting the island with a fortress-like defense shield. The first part involves a restructuring of the land use of all of the country’s major cities as residents are moved out of the city proper. Businesses and commercial endeavours will stay located within the cities, but residents will move out to sea and live in self-supporting residential skyscrapers, or citadels. The second part specifies the location of these citadels: They will be lined up as a single “sheet”, creating a barrier 2-3 km from the shoreline that can protect the mainland from tsunamis. The skyscrapers themselves are connected by a system of breakwaters and drainage channels, and are able to withstand waves up to 50 meters tall. These are further bolstered by a connected series of fibre sails, buried as deep as 1,200 meters, that surround the island. When the waves hit the sails and meet the oscillations of its stretched fibres, such a dissonance is created that the wave is reduced to nothing.
3. Monument to Civilization: Vertical Landfill for Metropolises
Third Prize: Monument to Civilization: Vertical Landfill for Metropolises by Lin Yu-Ta of Taiwan.
Most cities like to ship their garbage off to landfills that residents almost never see, but this skyscraper would pack a city's trash into one big tower. The structure would generate energy from the gases the decomposing garbage gives off. Cars and trucks would power up at a station at the skyscraper's base.
In a year, New York City generates enough trash for a tower 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) tall, the tower's designer, Lin Yu-Ta from Taiwan, told eVolo. Maybe the monuments to waste - Lin calls them "Monuments of Civilization" (or Tower of Trash) - would inspire worldwide competitions for the shortest tower and least waste, Lin said. But it's hard to imagine a city self-deprecating enough to build a nearly mile-high reminder of its detritus.
2. Mountain Band-Aid
Second Prize: Mountain Band-Aid by Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia and Zihan Wang of China.
Called the "Mountain Band-Aid," (of A Skyscraper Stretched on a Mountainside), this building would hug a mountain slope and make mining-damaged mountain faces inhabitable again. Water from the building would be recycled onto the mountainside, to help plants re-grow.
Shen and colleagues designed the building for Hmong people, a mountain tribal group of sustenance farmers known in the U.S. for fighting as guerrillas under direction of the CIA during the Vietnam War. More recently, in southern China, they've been moved from their high-altitude villages for mining projects. The designers want to help displaced Hmong people return home.
1. Himalaya Water Tower
First Prize: Himalaya Water Tower by Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song of China.
Also called Ice Towers in the Himalayas, these towers would collect and purify rainwater that falls in the Himalaya Mountains, and store it as ice. Then, if there's a drought in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan or China below, the towers release the water through a piping system for people to use.
Three billion people in Asia drink and water their crops with Himalaya melt-water, which feeds the Indus, Mekong, Yellow, Yangtze and other major rivers. But climate change has shrunk glaciers in the Himalayas more than anywhere else in the world, inciting worries that there won't be enough water in the region in the future. The towers are "meant to store plentiful water for future generations," according to eVolo. Storing the water in towers may also protect mountain towns from flash floods, which experts predict will result from the climate-driven melting of Himalayan glaciers.
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