A competition to find the best new concept skyscrapers of the future has announced its winners – and the ideas look straight out of science fiction.
eVolo Magazine chose three winners from more than 400 projects that were entered for the competition, which has been running since 2006.
The first came from Pawel Lipinski and Mateusz Frankowski from Poland, who designed the modular Mashambas Skyscraper, set in sub-Saharan Africa, which could be used as an education centre and marketplace for agricultural communities in the area.
The designers say the idea of the building is that it can also be quickly deconstructed, moved and rebuilt where it’s needed as a hub for trade and supplies.
Another of the winning designs revolves around the reintroduction of factories into the megacities of the future, but also combining them with recreational spaces to create vertical towers of mixed layouts.
The design, by US-based Tianshu Liu and Linshen Xie, was based around the idea that most of the world’s population will soon live in megacities, and environmental damage could be reduced by relocating out-of-town factory locations to skyscrapers in the city, cutting commute time.
The third winner was from Spain, by Javier Lopez-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar, who created the Espiral3500, which is designed to recreate the complexity of horizontal city landscapes in a vertical tower.
Among the other entrants were a tower built into the side of a mountain in Yosemite National Park in the US and another built into an iceberg.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the winners have as yet been commissioned for creation.
