How to win architecture competition? | Skyscraper 2023

In this article, we continue our series on Competitions.archi, presenting a collection of articles on different architectural competitions. Today, we will be featuring the winner of the Skyscraper 2023 Competition – an article from Architecture Competitions Yearbook 2023.

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It was a real surprise for us to win the eVolo 2023 Skyscraper Competition with a declaration of future inhabitation. We had lots of fun exploring the differences between architecture and machinery, using the skyscraper as a method to deal with over-centralized urbanization and irretrievable damage to our environment. Now, it gives us the opportunity to tell the whole story behind this project.

Team:

We are all currently year 4 college students at Wuhan University in China. Chang Lu, Bozhi Zheng, Duo Wang and I are majoring in architecture, and Shuxiao Zhang is majoring in translation, to help us convey the concept precisely. This project started from a school’s studio project, in which 4 of us came up with the idea of rotatable and movable dwellings, and designed the prototype in a real site. Outside of the studio, I spent the 2-month winter holiday at home modifying the design, translating the ideas into a more powerful architectural language, drawing the diagrams and renderings to a higher level. The outcome proves the value of our ideas and efforts.

Initial ideas

As mentioned above, this project was not aimed at eVolo in the very beginning. The task was to design a complex high-rise residential building beside Sanyang Road, Wuhan City, which is a city-center area close to the Yangtze River – the longest river in China.

Both new company blocks and old residential buildings are the main parts of this area. According to the site investigation, we found that the majority group living in the city center consists of elderly people (50s – 70s) who have owned their estates in their early years, while younger workers are forced to commute from the suburbs to this spot every day. It’s a common situation between centralized urbanization, or so-called metropolises, in which the soaring of housing prices inevitably causes a severe reduction in the affordability of housing for the middle and lower class. As a result, the majority of our megacities’ outlanders, usually those young immigrants, only share a small area of inhabitation.

So, the core idea at first is to solve the living problem of the youth by finding a cheaper way for them to get a house. But how to respond to that?

From that point we had the target group, the young immigrants. With the development of transportation, people’s mobility between cities has become stronger. Education, job opportunities and resources drive them to move, so migration is becoming increasingly frequent both domestically and internationally. The motivation for migration must be good, but the process of migration is always painful for your pocket and mental health. Frequently shifting settlements also means the waste of resources and the reduction of sustainability. The Archigram’s theory, the plug-in city provided us with thoughts about the issue. Why not create movable units which can be plugged into every station in different places and will greatly facilitate the migrating people? They don’t need to buy new houses and redecorate; they can come to the new city with their homes, all their possessions, and a sense of belonging.

Our team soon gathered to find the architectural responses to those ideas.

How ideas evolved: From wandering home to nomad metropolises

First edition: Wandering Home

Starting from the initial problem – how to release young’s stress in buying a house? During the brainstorming, we absorbed the idea from the space station, a place where gravity doesn’t exist. The gravity defines the floor, walls, and ceiling, but without gravity, every side is a living surface. On the earth, the existing house price calculation makes the floor area the only unit of measurement. However, by folding the four sides together and allowing the house to rotate, we can enjoy a fourfold area in only one-floor space, which means we can save 75% of our budget!

In this design, the capsule is separated into a fixed part and a rotatable part. Functions like the kitchen and toilet are arranged in fixed parts to connect the pipe systems. The other living areas are placed on 4 sides of the rotatable part, which users can customize along with their functions, such as bedroom, study, party room and so on. The furniture is well designed to suit rotating. For instance, cabinets can rotate to keep horizontal, while some sofas and desks can be used in two dimensions.

During the weeks when we were designing, the government was strictly enforcing the zero-case policy under Covid-19 pandemic. It prevented most of us from contracting covid indeed, however, lots of people were locked at home and couldn’t get supplies, such as food and medicine. Many people also suffered from mental problems because they couldn’t meet anyone. In this situation, we wanted people to have the option to meet with neighbors in order to help each other. Thus, we designed an “autonomous balcony” outside – a place the administrator cannot reach—where people can control if the space is shared with neighbors or occupied only by them. This can be realized by an extended system – residents can control their dwellings to occupy or release the balcony space, creating shared space or private space.

Then we redirected our thoughts back to the site because every studio project needs to be embedded in it. In order to deliver those movable dwellings, we designed holes, tracks, and cranes to enable vertical and horizontal movement.

The Yangtze River nearside inspired us to ship those capsule dwellings to different cities alongside, even across the ocean, so residents can migrate far away in a cheap way. We built a bridge to connect the site and the river to convey capsules directly.

For the dwellings’ station building, we analyzed the light conditions and arranged them into 8 sides of 2 blocks. The shape is like two organic cores (for offices and studios) surrounded by blocks (for residential). Branches extended from the middle, and green plants growing from cracks. There are also commercials and capsule stations on the ground floor, serving the community and around.

At the end of the studio work, we realized that there was a lack of logic in the development of the station building design. Why should it look like organic trees? How could this system be adapted in different cities and countries? Should it just be copied, or designed in a totally different way? What about inland cities without water transportation? This was a solid station, only capsule dwellings could move, so is this thing still a Nakagin Capsule Tower? These remaining questions pushed me to think again after the final review was over, even though we received good comments from our teacher and guests. So, when I decided to use this project for eVolo competition, the 2nd edition began.

Second edition: Nomad Metropolises

Those raised questions in dwellings’ station building design had to be all translated into a new replicable, adjustable system, which is able to convey the idea of migration life between cities in a much stronger way as the system needs to adapt to various scales, geography conditions and cityscapes. The system must be self-developing to meet different needs in the change of time like a small city. The system must be customized to satisfy all groups of people. Moreover, the system must take environmental issues into consideration, to prevent people from natural disasters that are happening more and more often. This system needs to illustrate a brand-new model of our future inhabitation. One metabolic agglomeration that could formulate communities of all kinds and could be placed wherever the tenants want. Thus, my focus moved from wandering “home” to nomadic “metropolises”.

The first step was to forget about the site, to find a common, general criterion among the continents. This strategy might be clever in such competitions as eVolo, which are open to futuristic solutions. It can also help think freely, avoiding limitations. From then on, the old design of building blocks was abandoned. Only rotatable and movable dwellings design remain.

After that, I began to seek for a new prototype for the dwelling’s station building system. I imagined this as a growable system, which can be enlarged and shrunk by the unit of block. Each block has almost the same frame but can be customized to fit different people and functions. I drew 3 sketches of block design, partly inspired by the cruise ship, which is also an independent system on the sea.

Each block is composed of the residential module in the middle and the service module on the side. The frames are exposed to make the module replaceable and can be replaced over time. Through different combinations, blocks can serve different types of groups. Different blocks are connected to the vertical traffic core, which greatly reduces the floor area of the cluster. The cranes are retained to lift and move the capsule dwellings from the ground to blocks in the sky. I also added a piece of roof park on the top, and car parks (maybe there will be flying cars in the future) at the bottom.

Here is the list of customized modules provided for different groups, such as single & couples, vacation tourists, core families, extended families, seniors, soho etc.

The combination of blocks was inspired by Moshe Safdie’s residential design in Singapore. With just several traffic cores dropping onto the ground, it can adapt to traffic land, forest land and cultivated land in the expansion of the city, and can also cope with disasters such as sea level rise.

The redesigned dwellings’ station started to satisfy me at that time, for it expressed the concept of metabolism on every scale. Then it’s time to develop the design of the capsule dwelling. I first designed the mechanical and ancillary facilities on a deeper level, using an explosion diagram to show how the capsule rotates, and how the water & electricity system connects.

Next was to convey ideas of the folding space and customize 4-side functions. It was interesting to design a user interface to better tell the story. Finally, my favorite part was to act like an interior designer to make the capsule look better. Based on the design in the studio, I changed some materials into metal, giving a delicate and elegant atmosphere. Some handrails, bookshelves, folding tables, and even dish racks are carefully designed to prevent things from falling during the rotation. Light design is also important to create a cozy feeling, then some daily necessities placed everywhere in the room are the key to the renderings.

The “autonomous balcony” design responding to Covid-19 policy has now become a solution for the flexibility of different family scales because that insecure period has passed away.

Personal insights and tips

Compared with previous winners of eVolo, my concept seems not as inventive in both topic and form, as I designed a general system which can function in many aspects of life with a rigid body. I suppose my advantages were the exhaustive architectural method to pursue the concept, packaging design concepts, focusing on immersive narrative, expressing concerns about current social issues and aspirations for future life and so on. Here are some tips from my personal perspective:.

Always explore school projects to the deepest

We found that nowadays many students like to create a brand-new design for competition and leave the studio project behind. As for me, this is a way to make participants more tired and less efficient. Usually, we spend the longest time on studio projects, along with instructions from the tutors. So, school projects are the best stage to gain the deepest thoughts, and to evolve for the competitions.

Be clear about what period of time your building fits in

This insight is just for future architecture design competitions like eVolo. We must first assume a period when this design could be real. For instance, the concept of nomad metropolises is set in dozens of years into the future, about 2050s to 2060s. The design is therefore convincing because it is expected to be realized with current technology. We can also assume that it needs to be set in the future when people know the way to overcome gravity. Designs such as the building floating in the sky must be equipped with more futuristic technologies that are yet to come.

Realize your idea in detail designs, not in a collage picture or parametric shape

In this design, under the system of the rotatable capsule and metabolism station, tons of detailed and tiny designs can be found. In the interior room, I designed a strip light and rotatable furniture. In the exterior of the station, I designed the frame, edge banding, and interesting facilities like the swimming pool. These things can highly strengthen the concept, tell the story, and make your architecture stand out vividly.

Build an unforgettable scenario in renderings, carefully select the view

After finishing the design, I faced the most difficult task in the competition – how to do renderings to attract the jury for the first time? The first is the grasp of the key originality and powerful expression. Just like the renderings on the first page of my eVolo project, I shot a scenario while the capsule is rotating. A 45-degree room? This can obviously catch the jury’s eye and be recognized as a rotatable unit. Then use photography theory to find the most impactful angles. The foreground, middle scene, and rear scene need to symbolize hierarchy, and the composition should be balanced and coordinated. Finally, we can add more trivial details to the scene, such as daily necessities placed everywhere, signs and stickers on the wall and neon projections in the sky, which can make the story alive. We can sometimes study what computer games do.

It’s good for architecture students to buy a drone

It must be the most interesting tip!. I bought a DJI drone 2 years ago just for my photography hobby, but soon I realized how much potential it can bring us in architecture design. In the site visit, the drone can take your sight to unreached places and simulate the view out of the future building. It can fly high to take a precise site plan. After the design, when we want to do renderings, we can first find the angle in the digital model, then bring our drone back to the site and find this angle to take a background picture. This creates the most realistic rendering compared to modeling the surrounding scene. On page 2 rendering of my eVolo project, the background city is the image where I took in the previous site in Wuhan. Maybe it’s an echo of the first edition.

Lastly, thank eVolo for giving us this award, and competitions.archi for giving us the opportunity to share this exciting story.