The
Evolo Skyscraper Competition is making an international call for submissions to its annual Skyscraper competition, with registrations due January 12th, 2010, and final submissions due a week later on the 18th.
The Skyscraper Competition has become a highly publicised award, with previous winners going on to prolific publication and exhibition, which supplements the reasonably modest monetary prize. A detailed archive of the previous winning and commended projects can be accessed at the Competition Website
here.
They explain: "The main idea of this contest is to examine the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world [cringe], the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and urban living", which reminds me to link you through the recent
winner of the NZIA Graphisoft Student Design Awards, Simon Harrison, who proposed a "neighbourly high-rise".
This type of speculative design competition should be encouraged for catalysing discourse and design work which confronts hugely important building typologies, and the future of the skyscraper certainly deserves a lot of attention and critical engagement. Here in New Zealand we are seismically (and perhaps economically) cautious about building very far into the skies, which is precisely why I think we could offer reasonable and contemplative proposals to the given invitation.
www.evolo-arch.com