CENTRAL PARK

Dramatic glass building that walls in Central Park wins skyscraper award

A glass wall “sidescraper” that closes in around New York’s famous Central Park could change the face of the city if two American designers have their way.

The dramatic proposal by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu has won this year’s eVolo 2016 Skyscraper Competition.

The design, entitled New York Horizon, would see a glass building border the entirety of the 3.41-kilometre-square park in the centre of Manhattan.

Sun and Wu’s project turns the traditional notion of a tall and lean skyscraper on its head. Their proposal is to excavate Central Park to reveal the bedrock hidden below and then build the elongated sidescraper down into the ground.

The creators of the ambitious project argue that while Central Park provides New Yorkers a necessary escape from the imposing concrete jungle, the park needs to be made available to more people.

‘Only a fraction of [New Yorkers] can enjoy Central Park’s natural environment on a daily basis.’eVolo 2016 Skyscraper Competition winners Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu

“Only a fraction of [New Yorkers] can enjoy Central Park’s natural environment on a daily basis, and most of the population either live or work beyond the walking distance from it,” they said in their brief.

The annual competition encourages architects and designers to “challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments”.

The winning concept wasn’t the only design to turn heads in this year’s competition.

The second prize went to Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu for their “vertical control terminal” that acts as a charging station and base for flying drones across New York.

The runners up designed a skyscraper designed for high-speed drone activity around New York City. Photo: eVolo

Taking into account drone technology and the increasing use of them in our daily lives, the designers created a building that would meet the future demand for high-speed drone services.

The end result is “a central control terminal that hosts docking and charging stations for personal or commercial drones in the centre of Manhattan”.

It’s proposed the skyscraper be built at 432 Park Avenue, just a few blocks from Central Park, which sets if apart from the regulated no-fly-zones in the city.

Third prize was awarded to an Italian duo for their data centre skyscraper in Iceland. Photo: eVolo

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in Iceland, an innovative and sustainable data centre was awarded third prize in the skyscraper competition.

Designed by Italians Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti, the building tackles the logistical dilemma of where to store all the world’s data created by our increasing online activity.

The duo wanted to create a skyscraper that could store and process data at a minimal cost and with low impact on the environment.

“Today data centres consume a lot of energy and have a large carbon footprint: servers absorb a lot of electrical power and they need to be constantly cooled down to avoid overheating problems,” the designers said in their project statement.

Iceland was chosen as the location for the data centre because of its ideal placement between the US and Europe, the country’s affordable renewable energy sources and its chilly climate to naturally cool down the servers.