eVolo Magazine has announced winners for 2019 in which the futuristic towers proposed city-like structures that help to upgrade urban conditions in their local environment. 

The jury, composed of Melike Altınışık, Vincent Callebaut, Marc Fornes, Mitchell Joachim, selected 3 winners and 27 honorable mentions from 478 projects received. 

The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

First prize went to Methanescraper designed by Marko Dragicevic from Serbia. The project is a vertical city-district in Belgrade that serves as landfill with recycling capabilities. 

The second prize winners selected as Klaudia Gołaszewska and Marek Grodzicki from Poland for the project Airscraper. Their proposal envisions a city-like skyscraper that cleans air of heavily polluted urban settlements.

Creature Ark: Biosphere Skyscraper designed by Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, and Yueya Liu from the United Kingdom received the third place. The project is a nature reserve skyscraper with research facilities.

The Honorable Mentions include an ice dam skyscraper that prevents further melting of the ice caps, a wooden skyscraper that pushes the boundary of the use of timber in vertical structures, and a horizontal skyscraper for the US-Mexico border among other innovative projects.

Scroll down to see the 2019 eVolo Magazine:

Image © Marko Dragicevic

Image © Marko Dragicevic

1st prize: Marko Dragicevic, Serbia

"Basing its foundations on the outlines of the Belgrade city, the new infrastructure generated on the left bank of the Danube river aims to establish a balance in hypothetical context of environmental and social imbalances by forming a new socio-industrial element in the form of a new city district. This new urban structure, District 3, can be defined as an anticipated context of overpopulation and mass urbanization, where the complex of vertical landfill systems serves as a response to the ever-growing amounts of disposable waste, shortage of natural resources and usable space, transforming informal Belgrade structures into the mechanism of material, economic and societal recycling."

Image © Klaudia Gołaszewska, Marek Grodzicki

2nd prize: Klaudia Gołaszewska, Marek Grodzicki, Poland

"The task of adapting cities to the impacts of air pollution is of great importance – megacities with their dense population, high traffic congestion and increasing CO2 emissions face major air pollution problems. Beijing is an alarming example of this problem. On certain days the city becomes nearly ‘uninhabitable’ due to dangerous levels of pollution. Around 1 million premature deaths per year, is a clear manifestation of this. Can architecture solve or help to alleviate the problem? Can we take one step further from Le Corbusier’s house as a machine for living, towards the skyscrapers as a machine for survival?"

Image © Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, Yueya Liu

Image © Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, Yueya Liu

3rd prize: Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, Yueya Liu, United Kingdom

"The proposed skyscraper is willing to recall the close relationship between human beings and their mother nature by the form of architecture. Every component in the ecosystem could hardly behave or survive as an individual literally, hence all living creature should appropriate the gifts from nature and they should be treated and valued equally. In modern society, the form of a skyscraper, carrying multiple functions, is expected to be one of the carries that making a better future."

Read more about the projects and see Honorable Mentions on eVolo Magazine website. 

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