Editors’ Choice

2020 Skyscraper Competition
Jun Peng

United States

The flood hazard of New York City is caused by heavy rainfalls, storm surges, and rising sea-level. Hurricanes primarily result in storm surges. Under a changing climate, a projected sea-level rise associated with hurricanes leads to overall flood elevations to increase greatly. In addition, more intense rainstorms are expected by the NYC Panel on Climate Change to an 11% increase in precipitation by the 2050s. Heavy rainfall will exceed the city?s infrastructure peak load and results in more flooding. The floodplain of the city is expanding greatly from 2020 to 2100 according to NYC Flood Hazard Mapper. Flooding generally causes huge social, environmental and economic devastation. An extreme case is Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Based on the data from the Official Website of the City of New York, its storm surge of 2.8 m above the mean tidal level caused an estimated $19 billion in damages and loss of economic activity across New York City. Thus, to protect the city from flooding is a big challenge. Facing the current and future flood risk of New York City, the design proposes to place ?Sponge Towers? along the edge of the flood risk zones to absorb the flood water which originally would have had the neighborhoods at flood risk zones to be inundated. Manhattan is used as the study area to illustrate the concept. A linear resilient ribbon park is proposed to buffer the entire Manhattan inland from its su...