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The 2024 eVolo Skyscraper Competition selected three winners and 14 honorable mentions from 206 submitted projects. Their concepts stretch the idea of a skyscraper well beyond a conventional city tower: proposals imagine growing food, regenerating a river corridor, filtering ocean water, harvesting fog and responding to disasters. These are speculative designs, not evidence of projects that have been built or proven to work.
What the 2024 eVolo competition set out to imagine
eVolo has held its annual Skyscraper Competition since 2006. The 2024 edition had no single overriding theme, but climate change and war appeared among the concerns addressed by entrants. The competition invites designers to rethink vertical architecture through technology, materials, program, aesthetics and spatial organization.
As quoted by New Atlas, eVolo Magazine said: “The Jury selected 3 winners and 14 honorable mentions from 206 projects received.” The selection is a showcase of architectural proposals; it does not establish that the concepts are feasible, funded, engineered for construction or operational.
The three winning skyscraper concepts
| Place and concept | Setting and problem | Proposed approach |
|---|---|---|
| First: Urban Intercropping | City; urban food production and the organization of daily life | Combines greenhouse food production with living areas and public transport, using intercropping ideas to organize urban space, light and resources. |
| Second: Streamline Concerto | China’s Yellow River; erosion and flood risks | A long “landscraper” following the river, paired with a proposed program of environmental regeneration. |
| Third: Ocean Lungs Skyscraper | Ocean; pollution and carbon | An ocean-spanning and underwater structure incorporating proposed filters and carbon-capture technology. |
Urban Intercropping: a tower for food and daily life
Rather than treating a skyscraper only as a place to work or live, Urban Intercropping brings food production into the tower’s program. Its greenhouse spaces are combined with housing and public transport. The intercropping principle shapes how the concept organizes light, resources and urban space; the competition description does not provide measured yields or demonstrate how the systems would perform in operation.
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Streamline Concerto: building logic along a river
Streamline Concerto departs from the isolated high-rise form. Its long landscraper follows the Yellow River, framing the building as part of a wider landscape proposal addressing erosion and flood risk. Environmental regeneration is an ambition of the concept, not a documented result.
Ocean Lungs: a proposed marine cleanup structure
Ocean Lungs imagines a structure extending across and below the ocean, with filters and carbon-capture technology intended to address pollution. The design’s cleanup function is a stated aim. No independently audited environmental performance data establish how much pollution or carbon it could remove.
What the 14 honorable mentions add
The honorable mentions widen the competition’s scope from food, rivers and oceans to water collection, air quality, archives, housing, manufacturing and emergency response. Among the concepts described in the 2024 report are:
- Water and air: Cloud Net Above The Three Gorges proposes fog collection and water harvesting; Air Catcher Skyscraper would place air-cleaning devices on building exteriors.
- Food and production: Urban Framing Depot is another high-rise food-production concept. A separate proposal combines clothing production with worker housing.
- Memory and civic life: Memory Drop Skyscraper proposes a data archive at Point Nemo. The Memory of Aleppo imagines a mixed-use civic hub that could also serve as a wartime shelter.
- Disaster response: One concept proposes a mobile disaster-response island for Japan.
- Water storage: Skycrafted Glacier Pinnacle draws inspiration from Himalayan ice stupas and proposes a glacial-ice water-storage structure.
- Other building visions: The mentions also include a nuclear-fusion-powered tower, a self-expanding carbon-fiber hotel and timber-frame housing.
These descriptions report what the concepts propose, not technical validation. The competition material cited by New Atlas does not supply independently verified performance results, construction status or cost comparisons for the entries.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteHow to read these visions as construction proposals
The projects are most useful as prompts for thinking about what tall or large-scale architecture might contain and address. Their aims can be compared, but their environmental benefits should not be treated as established outcomes. A competition concept is distinct from a buildable design: the available account does not demonstrate engineering, funding, approvals, construction or operation.
For a construction professional or client, that distinction matters. A proposal to grow food, capture water or filter pollution raises questions about systems, maintenance, safety, site conditions and measurable performance. The competition descriptions identify ambitions and broad approaches; they do not answer those implementation questions.
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