eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite architects, students, engineers, designers, and
“Human Scaled Reconstruction”
artists from around the globe to take part in the eVolo 2014 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture. It recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. It is a forum that examines the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and the city. The participants should take into consideration the advances in technology, the exploration of sustainable systems, and the establishment of new urban and architectural methods to solve economic, social, and cultural problems of the contemporary city including the scarcity of natural resources and infrastructure and the exponential increase of inhabitants, pollution, economic division, and unplanned urban sprawl. The competition is an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of a dynamic and adaptive vertical community. It is also a response to the exploration and adaptation of new habitats and territories based on a dynamic equilibrium between man and nature – a new kind of responsive and adaptive design capable of intelligent growth through the self-regulation of its own systems. There are no restrictions in regards to site, program or size. The objective is to provide maximum freedom to the participants to engage the project without constraints in the most creative way. What is a skyscraper in the 21st century? What are the historical, contextual, social, urban, and environmental responsibilities of these mega-structures? eVolo Magazine is committed to continue stimulating the imagination of designers around the world – thinkers that initiate a new architectural discourse of economic, environmental, intellectual, and perceptual responsibility that could ultimately modify what we understand as a contemporary skyscraper, its impact on urban planning and on the improvement of our way of life. Submission Requirements The project submission must contain the following files: 1. Two boards with the project information including plans, sections, and perspectives. Participants are encouraged to submit all the information they consider necessary to explain their proposal. These boards should be 24″(h) X 48″(w) in HORIZONTAL format. The resolution of the boards must be 150 dpi, RGB mode and saved as JPG files. The upper right corner of each board must contain the participation number. There should not be any marks or any other form of identification. The files must be named after the registration number followed by the board number. For example: 0101-1.jpg and 0101-2.jpg. 2. A DOC file containing the project statement (600 words max). This file must be named after the registration number followed by the word “statement”. For example: 0101-statement.doc. 3. A DOC file containing the entrants’ personal information, including name, profession, address, and email. This file must be named after the registration number followed by the word “info”. For example: 0101-info.doc. 4. All the files must be placed in a ZIP folder named after your registration number. For example: 0101.zip
John Peterson-Krystel Valverde-Jason Flax-Sarah Costanza-Liana Kelly-Mark Mancini Detroit, a city once home to vibrant and revolutionary life, has been subject to the most extreme depression within the past five decades than any other metro area in the United States. Through its history, Detroit has been able to call home to several industry changing companies and people that would forever change the face of American life. Unfortunately, there has been an exodus of that life within the past 50 years. The lack of jobs has created a lack of purpose, that lack of purpose has produced the absence of basic education which as end result has vanquished the city of all wealth, both physical and mental. The inhabitants of Detroit have lost their sense of belonging and identity to the push for suburban utopia. As all the life pushed outward, it left the city to rot in the ruins where gods of industry once stood. The HUMAN SCALED RECONSTRUCTION is broken down into four steps with three types of modern machines. The first step in the reconstruction process lies within the breakthrough of automated QUADRA-COPTER DRONES. These drones provide endless abilities of scanning any environment and traversing any landscape. Drones have the ability of either being piloted remotely or preprogrammed to follow a path of travel. Equipping these drones with 3D laser scanning abilities and motion sensor devices, we now have the ability to see and document every detail. Sending an army of these drones to navigate the city on a preprogrammed algorithm allows us to understand what’s happening to the city in a physical structural sense. These findings will provide us with various types of information, all regarding to the existing structures and their present condition. After the data from the drones have been analyzed, is when we deploy phase two of the reconstruction. This phase comes in the form of pieces of equipment found in any port, SHIPPING CONTAINER CRANES. These cranes will allow us to traverse over a large space with ease. With a simple modification to the spacing between the legs, these cranes will be removed from the port and utilized in an urban context. Using the height of the cranes, we now have the ability of hovering over city blocks. As the cranes traverse over the landscape in a pattern predetermined by the data collected from the drones, the cranes will be doing two functions – cleaning and recycling. Equipped with a vacuum like fixture at each end of the cranes arms, the cranes will pass over the city and consume any broken pieces of existing structures. While the vacuums are eating up the broken pieces, the core of the cranes will be recycling the consumed elements into the final piece of the puzzle. The consumed pieces are being transformed into pieces of living technology closely related to what are called smart cubes. These cubes are self-aware, self-automated and self-constructing. Building from the current modules, these cubes are in constructed from scrap materials and transformed into ‘living’ pieces. Each cube is created with 8 needed human programmatic functions that when combined create 6 aspects of specific social environments. Understanding that humans need laws to follow, institutions for learning and health, employment, food, social responsibilities, shelter and renewable resources creates specific social functions to follow such as communication, morals & values, communal advancement, mental stability, nourishment and preservation of self. As these cubes are dropped from the cranes, they then begin to find each other and construct spaces needed for a specific area which were defined from the analysis gathered from the drones. These spaces then become occupiable based upon one of the predefined functions.