Cities are becoming more densely populated and with it comes new high-rise architecture solutions to house the expanding urban populations. Towers in the past embodied the vertical multiplication of the ground to maximize the buildable area leaving minimal, if any, connection between the floors, thus working against notions of community. The Sky City project aims to look at vertical connectivity as a hypothetical test case for Beijing. It aspires to embody the spirit of a rapidly modernizing city and creating an elegant vision of community within highrise congestive urban living.
World Architecture & Design Awards 2019
Second Award | Category: Mixed Use (Concept)
Architects: Sohith Perera
Studio: Design SPI
Team Members: Sohith Perera, Svetlana Demchenko, Bas Van Wylick, Julian Sattler
Country: United States
Website: www.designspi.com
The towers complex is comprised of mixed-use developments combining office, hotel, retail, and service apartment components all tied together with a series of horizontal bridges and vertical atriums. The project effectively becomes a multi-level city with creating internal pedestrian networks and communal connections. The project works as a series of horizontal and vertical nodes.
Steel is an important building material used especially in buildings with complex geometries. Using the Eifel tower as a reference, the towers use a space frame construction for the super columns on the 3 edges of the triangular footprint of the towers to accommodate the twisting shape and the connective bridges. In-between the structure fills in as diagram or vertical column based on the program.
Sky City celebrates structure by exposing it highlighting it with color to showcase it as a layer of the building assembly. The façade utilizes stainless steel sun shading elements over the curtain wall for thermal performance. On the interior atriums, stainless steel panels are used as decorative panels to create a screen providing levels of privacy.
The overall design is future projection of the potential scale of architecture and the role steel will can play not only as structural but as decorative and performative elements for new typologies of cities.
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