eVolo

Sohta Mori - Yuichiro Minato

special mention - 08 Skyscraper Competition

The ground represents everyday affairs, such as people, politics, traffic, pollution. We work and live on the ground, shuffle through corridors, wait on roads, and it is still on the surface where our life takes place. The sky is freedom, heaven, a place to dream, wish, and escape. To escape from everything on the ground, we have to climb into the sky. Conventional skyscrapers allow us to elevate ourselves and gaze out over the city, but the feeling of being separated and enclosed remains. The dialogue is one-way; we cannot interact with or enter the sky. We are like animals behind a glass, unable to break free from the world below.

Escaper is an instrument to catch the sky. It avoids direct visual contact with the ground by twisting its body. Its reflective skin presents an image of the upper atmosphere. Escaper wraps and folds around itself, allowing the sky to be part of the building, and the building a part of the sky. By making itself an element of the firmament, it eludes the eyes on the ground, despite its massive volume. It is made from three buildings, which intertwine to create a shifting dynamic between volumes, functions, and people. Between the three connected volumes, the sky is contained in a central space, punctuated by large floating gardens. Three vertical cores run through the gardens, allowing people to ascend directly to and between them. The five strata of artificial ground inhabit the sky and are meeting and gathering spaces for people from the three volumes. They are for everybody, a congregation above the city.

The three dividing and converging buildings that comprise Escaper vary from one another in function and character. By connecting these buildings to each other by means of the large artificial gardens, these functions and characters can merge, activities can mix and finally inspire a new movement in the sky. In a conventional skyscraper, all functions are piled vertically, stacking up on each other to the point where we can rarely understand the many different activities on the other floors. We may be vertically just a few meters away from a situation that we are completely unable to comprehend. It is an insular approach, sealing people into their compartment and not allowing interaction or cross-fertilization. With this method of juxtaposition we can rarely gain new experiences, and it leads to the monotonous repetition of everyday tasks. It serves only to make a dull, depressing and inhumane life for the people in the building.

Escaper seals itself from the ground, but opens itself to the sky. In the captured section of the atmosphere, Escaper mixes and merges function, activity, context, and life, to create a rich canopy of happenings. The structure promotes communication and interaction, while simultaneously supporting private, intimate spaces that can be used for personal reflection or private encounters. The dialogue is between people, sky and volumes, and these are detached from and unknown to the world below.