7 crazy concepts from the Skyscraper Competition 2024

A magazine about architectural design since 2006, eVolo, hosted an annual competition to recognize the year’s most creative, ambitious and downright fantastic skyscraper concepts. The publication’s editors announced three winning works for 2024 and 15 distinctions selected from a pool of 206 entries.

(Related: Colossal Skyscrapers Could Use Height to Make Gravity Batteries.)

From complex, mobile structures encompassing integrated farm plots to underwater ocean-cleaning towers to entire neighborhoods suspended over giant dams, this year’s picks may never go beyond conceptual renderings, but they provide fascinating, inspiring ideas about what future sustainable, purposeful city planning could look like around the world.

The first-place winner of the 2024 Skyscraper Competition was the team whose entry, “Urban Intercropping,” examines the challenges facing the metropolitan center of Xinjiang in northwestern China. Inspired by the agricultural method of intercropping, the team’s design incorporates mechanical and non-mechanical structures to create mobile housing units and modular agricultural spaces. To control air quality and sandstorms, the team suggests specific plants for each ecological corridor and a greenhouse “membrane” that “provides space for animal migration and healthy green spaces for pedestrians and transportation.”

Second place went to the Ocean Lungs Skyscraper, which was envisioned by a 10-person team from Egypt and would be built more than 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, where “cutting-edge carbon capture technology” would help filter out harmful CO2. The core of the structure is partially made of aragonite, the main component of coral skeletons, to serve as the foundation for new artificial reefs. Meanwhile, tower platforms allow researchers to conduct continuous monitoring of the marine ecosystem and create scalability opportunities to build many similar underwater towers.

“Sustainability is key,” the team explains in the project description. “This is where innovation meets conservation, bringing life back to the oceans.”

One of the most surreal ideas came from Pablo Allen Vizan and Inma Herves González from Germany – the Memory Drop Skyscraper skyscraper. The installation is located in Point Nemo, the region in the Pacific Ocean that is the farthest from any land. It seems to be a meditation retreat complex that everyone has the right to visit once a year. During their stay, residents will have access to personalized family data archives containing generations of memories, artifacts and other digital keepsakes. Memory Drop is clearly described as a “pilgrimage” for anyone who wants to experience the installation.

Trying to express the whole idea is quite difficult, especially since Vizan and González’s submission describes a teardrop-shaped spherical tower that “contains a symbolic void that gives meaning to its form.” If nothing else, the graphics are very nice – and who wouldn’t want a free annual trip to the Pacific Ocean?

Check out a few more eVoloBelow is the list of award winners for 2024.