Bin Yan, Jiahui Guo

United States

This skyscraper project intends to propose and experiment a new folding prototype of informal urbanization in one of the largest and most complicated metropolitan cities in the world?Beijing.
We are inspired from a provocative science fiction novel named ?Folding Beijing? by a Chinese writer Ms. Hao Jingfang. This fiction depicts a serious whereas unsurprising future of Beijing, when the city sustain more than ten times of its current population, that different groups of people are segregated spatially and chronologically. In fact, this fiction might not be as surrealistic as it might suggest, according our investigation, there are more than 3.2 million people in Beijing who have to live and work during the night. They, together with their families, contribute to the urban metabolism such as street cleaning, facility maintenance, logistics, etc. They sacrifice their biological clock to minimize the impact of their works for the city?s majority, however, their contribution, as well as their weakness of life are always ignored, they are losing their homes, the shanty neighborhoods, which are gradually encroached and erased under the capital-driven urban sprawl. We believe that people will live alternatively in future cities to maximize the spatial capacity and efficiency to sustain the vast population. Therefore, the question for us, the designers and builders of the future city, is to think about the new architecture prototypes which contr...