Editor’s Choice

2016 Skyscraper Competition
Yungi Jung, Jeong Gwang Hwang

South Korea

With the rapid growth of world population over the last century, man-made deserts have ever expanded worldwide. Our continuous overuse of available land for intensive farming, feeding livestock, and logging trees has caused severe degradation of soil that turns once-fertile lands into barren deserts.
The consequences are detrimental. Each year, 12 million hectares of land are lost, cutting down global food production and aggravating poverty in rural areas. In the deserts of China?which is the primary site of the Desertscraper?dust storms blow eastward polluting the air of the cities of China and of neighboring countries like Korea and Japan. They even affect the West Coast of the US across the Pacific. The increased carbon emissions, moreover, are precipitating global warming. As the world population is expected to increase up to 10 billion in just 50 years, restoring healthy soil and vegetation to reverse desertification is a matter of utmost urgency.
The Desertscraper is a solar-powered mobile skyscraper that restores healthy vegetation in man-made deserts and facilitates long-term growth of green areas. The skyscraper counteracts the ever-growing threat of desertification through two major operations: transplanting greenery and enhancing the general quality of the degraded soil.
First and foremost, the Desertscraper operates as a gigantic, regional transplanter that transplants...