Honorable Mention
2014 Skyscraper Competition
With bigger and worse natural
disasters appearing on the news with no signs of slowing down, we need to
rethink how cities should rebuild. When a city is destroyed, it is a sign that
the city’s infrastructure is not suitable for the environmental conditions of
that particular location. With so much variation of inherent environmental
properties around the globe, why do we globalize a singular infrastructural
system?
Christchurch, New Zealand
is one city that has recently been devastated by an earthquake. With citywide
liquefaction destroying infrastructure, it is clear that the typical method of
construction is not suited for such soil condition. The immediate response by
the city is to artificially condition the soil for better building surface, but
this method of forcing nature to take form of an ideal environment to
perpetuate the same construction technique seems time consuming and wasteful.
The proposal is a system
that adapts into the current environmental conditions without the need for
tweaking, alteration or correction. For the new city, unstable soil becomes a
necessity and not a burden as the structure buries and sinks into the ground by
exploiting the phenomenon of liquefaction. This project becomes an example of
rethinking adaptation by responding to the nature of site without being
constrained by traditional methods.