Two American designers have won a hypothetical skyscraper competition with a proposal to surround New York’s Central Park with a wall the size of Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower.
Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu’s winning entry in the 2016 Evolo Skyscraper Competition, New York Horizon also proposes to dig down to bedrock of Central Park to create a new mountainous environment and to relocate the excavated soil to other neighbourhoods on Manhattan Island.
The idea is that neighbourhoods dispossessed by the new pockets of landscape deposited around the city would move into the new mega structure that wraps the perimeter of Central Park.
The structure would be 300 metres tall but only 30 metres deep which the designers say would break the traditional Manhattan predilection for large-scale skyscrapers without wasting the valuable ground area of Manhattan.
With a total floor area of around 18sqm, the structure would also provide a massive number of living quarters for New Yorkers who live in one of the most densely populated areas in the USA at 10,385 people per sqkm.
The Evolo Skyscraper Competition jury selected a first, second and third place and handed out 21 honorable mentions in the 2016 edition of the awards, which began in 2006.
Second Place went to a vertical control terminal tower for advanced flying drones called The Hive, while third went to a sustainable skyscraper in Iceland designed for Internet servers.
The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas for building high- projects 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.
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Images: Evolo
