2021 Skyscraper Competition

Editors’ Choice
Daniel Shen, Benjamin van Nostrand

Canada

The global megamachine that connects us operates as a complex network, a global system of flows of goods, financial capital, information, and ideas on how the world is and how it should be. The dominant organizing principle of the megamachine is the endless accumulation of capital, the central logical motor for the aggressive expansion and permanent growth that the machine needs to exist.
The megamachine comprises the most powerful organizations of the world. The 500 largest companies generate half of the global GDP. Their products ? cars and medicine, smartphones and machine guns, animal fodder and electricity ? are interchangeable means to their real end: the endless multiplication of money. To keep the machine running, once the demand for certain products is satisfied, new demands need to be created. After a half millennium, the long expansion nears insurmountable limits, the accumulation machine is stuttering. At the same time, rapid unchecked urbanization across the globe has, seemingly overnight, turned the revival of the cities into a new kind of urban crisis of housing and affordability.
It is at this intersection that, in a masterstroke, the megamachine turns to the commoditization of living space itself.
It does so by looking to the only architecture that it understands, the modernist home, a codified system designed as a machine for living. In a savage capture and appro...