Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition
Loren M. Supp
United States
Rather than looking at the city as an extension of architectonic space, the Shanghai market is here reinvented as an internal extension of a fluid landscape. Operating under this axiom, the vertical market changes the previous horizontality of the urban activity by pulling the city fabric upwards, enabling a further densification of the city.
While modeling the existing economic flows of the city there was revealed a potential for a systemic expansion of the streetscape skyward. This move enables an accretion of market functions, pulling the chaotic action to a single site. Formally and theoretically, the degradative nature of fluid market economics define the building architecture, the thickness of circulatory structure responds to the predicted expenditure of capital as one moves through the building, and space is allocated for market activity accordingly.
After initial studies into fluid tendencies of market vectors and their formal potentials, the spatial needs for a market were investigated using a dynamic technique reliant upon the structural generator of the fluid form, a typological skyscraper was deformed. The resultant change in topology was then used to define the spatial and formal conditions of the market itself.
The union of the fluid structure and its progeny allow for almost unlimited market program. Interconnected market spaces are united through a flowing structure and circulation, while the pods create an unlikely juxtaposition of both unity and definition. This juncture lies at the nexus of the Shanghai marketplace and citizenry, the need to blend in, to sell ,and to hide; or in the fluidic context of the city, to live and flow like the building that houses them.
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