Skyscraper Competition, eVolo Announces Winners For 2017

eVolo Magazine has announced its 2017 Skyscraper Competition winners. The annual award aims to recognize potential visionary ideas in building high-rise projects through the capitalized use of technology, programs and materials, mediums, aesthetics, and spatial organizations.

Since the first launch of Skyscraper Competition in 2006, eVolo have received over 6000 projects from around the world, according to Archinect. In the 2017 Skyscraper Competition, entrants were challenged to re-examine the vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments, in consideration of potential vertical living in the 21st century.

"Mashambas Skyscraper" by Pawel Lipiński and Mateusz Frankowski from Poland, won the grand prize of the 2017 Skyscraper Competition. The winning design proposes a modular educational center and marketplace for sub-Saharan Africa, which includes a vertical stack of factory and recreational space, as well as villages embedded in mountains and even a skyscraper built within a giant sequoia.

The second place winner of the 2017 Skyscraper Competition focuses on Manila in the Philippines. The design proposes an idea of moving factories back to megacities, which calls for a series of alternating architectural layers combining factories and recreational areas to create a vertical structure. Each recreational layer would feed from the waste and resources of these factories.

Meanwhile, the third place of the 2017 Skyscraper Competition goes to "Espiral3500" by Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar from Spain. Espiral3500 is situated in 'La Albufera', an agricultural natural park that has been faced with expansive development and growth. Therefore, the project aims to understand the facets of relationship and "the role played by private and public spaces within the skyscraper."

According to Arch Daily, this year's jury consisted of Eric Bunge, the principal of nArchitects; Manuelle Gautrand, the principal of Manuelle Gautrand Architecture; and Ferda Kolatan, the founding director of su11, amongst five others. Three winners and 22 honorable mentions were selected from a pool of 444 entries in the 2017 Skyscraper Competition.