eVolo's Skyscraper Competition, organized yearly by eVolo Magazine, seeks for new ideas to redefine skyscraper design “through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution”. Highly conceptual proposals investigate how this building typology can gain a renewed positive relation with both human society and natural environment. List of winner entries here.
OUR ENTRY: FOLDSC(R)APE GOMMAdesign’s conceptual skyscraper for eVolo 2011 competition explores the geometrical results of applying the "Oblique Function” to the verticalization of the city. The most important challenge of the project was to avoid losing, during this process, the most peculiar aspect of Rome’s urban life system: the vivid community life and the town-like neighborhoods.
To design a skyscraper for such a peculiar city like Rome is a very challenging and fascinating task, as it gives the chance to investigate the most innovative and unconventional possibilities for this kind of building. Rome, because of its huge historical heritage, never really considered a vertical development. On one hand, in new neighborhoods, speculative urbanization led to the million cubic meters of low quality buildings without an efficient planning of services and public spaces. On the other hand, in historical and central neighborhoods, the quality of life is instead very high and animated by a vivid social community. By examining some example of urban fabrics in Rome, we derived the main parameters which led our design strategy and influenced the morphology of our system. The project is located on a disused lot in the former Fair Area. Our proposal aims to provide an exaggerated amount of available square meters, while ideally preserving at the same time the neighbourhood-lifestyle basic features: the solution of this contrast was our conceptual challenge.
Starting from Claude Parent and Paul Virilio’s speeches, we propose a territorial formation based on the "Oblique Function”. The variation of horizontality of the ground plane facilitates less regular movements of the users and multiplies the opportunities for meeting and socialization. The practical strategy we identified and applied consists in making a two-dimensional surface threedimensional, in order to achieve continuous interconnections between different levels, and to turn the flat functional mix (distributed on the original surface) into a three-dimensional complex space, where functions may re-colonize the most suitable areas with a certain degree of adaptability of spaces and routes.
The morphogenetical process which generates the building is recursive. The geometrical operations defined in the system are applied iteratively, first to the whole building, then to each single strip that constitutes the structural and morphological fabric of the tower. Indeed, the tower has the same morphology and the same geometry of its base components. The whole building and the single folded plate act and look the same, they are self-similar, as they share the same five operations defined to generate the morphology of the system.
