In January, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat highlighted the news that there were 100 supertall (984 feet and up) skyscrapers in the world following the completion of 432 Park Ave. in New York City. The first 50 were built over a span of eight decades from 1930 to 2010, the next 50 in only five years.
Not everyone is happy about this rash of soaring structures, which are only the most obvious answer to the chronic problem of increasing urban density in cities across the planet. The first-place winner of eVolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition—an annual contest that bills itself as a forum for “visionary ideas” that in reality range from provocative to pure science-fiction insanity—proposes an opposite approach. “New York Horizon” by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu is a radical, dystopian plan for a horizontal skyscraper embedded in the perimeter of a sunken Central Park.
eVolo
“Our proposal is a hybrid multi-functional mega structure,” the designers write in a project description. “Not by building up, but by digging down.” By revealing hidden bedrock beneath Central Park, they write, and creating space for the horizontal building, they would “[break] the traditional perception of large-scale skyscrapers” without using up “valuable ground area” in Manhattan, creating 7 square miles of additional space. The structure would be covered in “highly reflective glass” on all sides, they explain, to create “an illusion of infinity.”
eVolo
eVolo
Check out all the competition winners here.
