Winners of eVolo 2019 Skyscraper Competition

As in previous years, the winners look forward to a (not-too?) distant future where environmental and social issues reshape the built environment and demand radical responses. While some of the imagery feels dystopian, the designs are optimistic in their use of tall structures for handling waste, cleaning the air, and helping endangered animals.

The first place winner — Methanescraper by Marko Dragicevic — asserts "that a person living in the city can produce up to four times more waste than a person living in the countryside" so therefore "changes the model of a typical landfill into a raw vertical infrastructure." The towers imagined for Belgrade would treat sorted waste in capsules attached to the towers' concrete cores and produce energy through the methane drawn from each capsule.

The second place project — Airscraper by Klaudia Gołaszewska and Marek Grodzicki — also sees large cities as problems, with air pollution arising from dense population, high traffic congestion and increasing CO2 emissions. The 800-meter-tall Airscraper is seen as "a machine for survival," a play on Le Corbusier's famous assertion that "a house is a machine for living in." A hollow core draws polluted air from street level and cleans it "through a complex filtration system inside the chimney." Residences start at 400 meters, where the air would be cleaner.

The third place project — Creature Ark: Biosphere Skyscraper by Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, and Yueya Liu — focuses on the conservation of wildlife in response to rising global surface temperatures and human activity impacting animal habitats. Imagined as a "vertical nature reserve" combined with a research station, the semi-porous tower would nurture and protect endangered species near in Ghana, West Africa.

The Jury for the eVolo 2019 Skyscraper Competition was comprised of Melike Altınısık (Melike Altınısık Architects), Vincent Callebaut (Vincent Callebaut Architectures), Marc Fornes (THEVERYMANY), and Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE).