Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, rendering for “New York Horizon,” winner of eVolo Skyscraper Competition 2016 (all images courtesy eVolo)
According to the winners of eVolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition, the New York City of the future could include a massive drone-docking tower and a torn-up Central Park replaced with lakes and hills atop a submerged, mirrored horizontal apartment/office complex.
The contest, in its 10th year, invites designers to submit their concepts for futuristic towers that are then judged by the principals of major architecture firms. Most of this year’s winning entries are designs for a dystopia, examples of how the next generation of architects might attempt to delay humanity’s self-destruction: the designs accommodate for overpopulation, global warming, and some of the 7 million drones estimated to fly in US skies by 2020.
The winning design, called New York Horizon, proposes tearing up Central Park — the third most visited tourist attraction in the world — to expose the “rugged, bedrock-strewn landscape” beneath. The designers, recent RISD grads Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, say they would “relocate the soil from the original park to various neighborhoods, which would be demolished and moved into the new structure,” and then transform the sunken landscape into hills, valleys, and lakes for hiking and swimming. Around the park’s perimeter they would build a horizontal, 100 feet deep “sidescraper,” housing apartments, stores, museums, and libraries in its 1,000-foot high walls.
Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, rendering for “New York Horizon,” winner of eVolo Skyscraper Competition 2016 (click to enlarge)
This is a bad and virtually impossible idea, but listing the reasons why is beside the point. As Kristin Copps points out in CityLab, many of these winning designs, and their wild impracticality, speak less to the actual future of architecture than to the rise of internet “Contestism,” “a trend in architecture that flows from the convergence of open-design competitions, cheap rendering software, and viral media.” Such competitions drive an impulse to come up with fantastical renderings that prioritize shareability over feasibility. That doesn’t mean they’re not cool, imaginative ideas, but perhaps they shouldn’t be taken much more seriously than, say, the animated flying buildings of The Jetsons or the MC Escher–inspired architecture of video games like Monument Valley.
Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu, rendering for “The Hive: Drone Skyscraper,” second-place winner in the 2016 eVolo Skyscraper Competition
Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti, rendering for “Data Tower,” a concept for a sustainable skyscraper in Iceland for web servers, third-place winner in eVolo Skyscraper Competition 2016
h/t CityLab
“Around the park’s perimeter they would build a horizontal, 100 feet deep “sidescraper,” housing apartments, stores, museums, and libraries in its 1,000-foot high walls.”
Could someone edit this, please?
(A building 100ft deep will have walls of … wait for it … *100*ft!)
Depth isn’t the same as height.
Indeed it is not.
So tell me: from reading the description and looking at the image, how anyone could simultaneously see a 100ft deep building (a ‘sidescraper’) *and* a thousand foot high building?
– In the *same* building? –
You comment does not remove the fact that someone has made a typo.
i imagine it as a surrounding “wall” that is 1,000ft high. and that wall is 100 ft thick. so within the wall you can have stores and such. : )
Ah! That interpretation never occurred to me. I took ‘deep’ as depth downwards into the earth – as that was the main feature of this fantasy.
Okay, I think there is room for us to both be right here.Thanks for clarifying your interpretation. I’ll get off my high horse now.
Great. So Central Park would then be dark most of the day. BRILLIANT! And then people will stop going there because the crime rates would be even higher! Its like Central Park at night nearly all day long!