2022 Skyscraper Competition

Editors’ Choice
Jerry Woo, Chujin Xue

China

Just as mankind are confused about the direction of development, a future of nature that science failed to foresee come quietly. With more than 70% of the land on the planet covered with sand and sea level rising sharply, the only moderate land left cannot support a huge population. When the former homeland is no longer livable, the day will come when human beings are forced to return to the sand like their ancestors did and live in an intensive way. Fierce as it is for burying thousands of lives, meanwhile, the sand also provided materials needed for construction. Transitioned from the “carbon age” to the “silicon age”, the sand-made community came into being. The environmental background of this design is based on the current situation of increasing global desertification and climate anomalies. The initial conception of the design comes from the ancient Chinese saying “gather sand into a tower”, and also benefits from some understanding of the desert ecology in the movie “Dune”.
The sand-made community includes two parts, the ground and the underground. The ground mainly provide housing, natural light and sand. The underground part is mainly used for industrial production and agricultural planting. The entire building is assembled from prefabricated components of fixed modulus. Each town is connected adjacent to each other. Important resources ...