by Lloyd Alter, Toronto
Design & Architecture
The Evolo Competition “recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution.” The entries are mind-boggling in their detail, the ideas often extraordinary, and in my opinion, the judges almost always wrong. I showed the winners and a few honorable mentions earlier; Now Evolo has sent us some of the other finalists to view. I will show a few of the more interesting concepts over the next few days.
People are so mobile now, yet we fix ourselves into apartments and houses that are not. That’s why I have been so fascinated by mobile architecture like trailers. Luca D’Amico and Luca Tesio address the issue with a plug-in structure where your home in a container can follow you wherever you go.
Globalization has transformed a considerable amount of city dwellers into modern nomads – people that settle for a few months or years in different cities around the world.
The Containers Skyscraper is an idea to provide nomad housing to this specific type of urban dweller. It consists of an exoskeleton where regular shipping containers transformed into apartment units plug-in. The main structure provides basic infrastructure as well as recreational areas while the habitable units can be transported by ship, truck, and train to almost every large city worldwide providing a sense of “home” to these modern urban nomads.
We have shown so many vertical farms, but they have primarily been for vegetables. Lee dongjin, Park Jinkyu and Lee Jeongwoo propose a spiral farm, a sort of endless field.
In the last few years we have seen many projects for vertical agriculture but the Circular Symbiosis Tower is the first skyscraper that proposes a vertical farm for actual livestock. The main concept is to create a new habitat to raise cattle within the city. The skyscraper consists of spiraling platforms or grass fields where cows will be free to roam. After 30 days of habiting the same pasture they will rotate to the next level. At this point other animals like chickens will use the previous field until its grass has grown again. Transportation costs will be non-existent and the raised animals will have a better quality of life.
Paris is so, well, consistent, full of Haussmannian Euro-loafs and nothing on the skyline but that horrible Canadian Montparnasse Tower from the seventies and the Eiffel Tower, which Guy de Maupassant thought was so ugly that he had lunch in its restaurant every day, claiming that it was the only place in Paris that he couldn’t see the thing from. Perhaps Paris needs a few more towers, so that the first two don’t stick out so much.
How to integrate a skyscraper into the historic urban fabric of Paris? After the controversial construction of the Montparnasse tower, this project seeks to develop a middle ground between super-high skyscrapers and the existing Haussmannian fabric of the city – a challenge characterized by the desire to create a coherent link between the existing context and the various programs of the skyscraper that would bring the city to the 21st century.
One of the strategies is to create a new pedestrian layer for the city through the utilization of the rooftops – a link between the traditional horizontal city and the new vertical extensions or contemporary Parisian skyscrapers. These new buildings are designed using the existing fabric as reference, where you will be able to find little squares, picturesque streets, parks, housing, and many cultural facilities.


More at Evolo, and more tomorrow.
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(Source: www.treehugger.com )