Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition
Karol Łącki, Dominik Pierzchlewicz, Szymon Ciupiński
Poland
In 50 years’ time there will be more rubbish than fish in the ocean.Without interfering in temporal activities, the world of marine fauna and flora will die. The most important step mankind should take is to stop further waste emissions, as well as to raise awareness of waste management. The world of architecture faces the challenge of counteracting to one of the most serious problems in the world.
When choosing the subject matter of the project, there was no doubt that the designed skyscraper had to meet the challenge of cleaning the oceans from waste. The project presents a model of a skyscraper, which will be placed in the largest garbage patches in the oceans. Its main task will be to start the process of cleaning up the oceans and finally eliminate the floating islands. The shape of the skyscraper is determined by its main function – compressing oceanic rubbish. The designed facility is a huge floating piston that compacts waste directly on site. In order to protect ocean life, it collects for disposal only the most polluted tissue from the water surface without the use of pumps. The only force that allows waste to find its way inside the pressing chamber is gravity. When the garbage isinside the piston, a baler crushes it into a disc whose height depends on the density and type of garbage. After this process, the waste is pushed beyond the length of the piston and packed into a specially designed reusable cover so that the waste no longer has the potential to spread across the ocean. The net filled with disks iscollected by a designated ship and then disposed or recycled. The design concept is that waste can be collected by container ships on non-container-loaded journeys. Above the entire waste compaction sector, which consists of a compaction chamber, a piston and an engine room for the entire technological process, there is a section dedicated to ocean research. On the two lowest floors there is a storage area, above which the re are two medical levels that serve the people working in the building, and equally importantly, there is veterinary support facilities for animals that have suffered while living in a polluted ocean. A three-storey residential section for has been designed above. There is a social area and an office area aboveit. The lamp, placed on one of the levels, not only serves as a landmark, it is anallegory to the archetype of the skyscraper, which was the inspiration for the first skyscrapers – the lighthouse. The last floor serves as a helicopter landing pad on the roof.
The second aspect of the project is the educational activity aimed at reducing global plastic consumption. Garbage stains on the ocean are invisible to the majority of the public due to their distance from land. This results in a low level of awareness of the scale of the threat. In order to highlight the problem, the discs were symbolically placed in the panoramas of the most recognizable cities in the world in the form of high postuments – the monument of waste. This will show the size of the problem by comparing the amount of compacted rubbish to the scale of the city. An unaesthetic skyscraper towering over the buildings will contrast. It is a symbolic demonstration of what mankind has deserved over the years of its activity and a direct reference to the ocean fauna, which for years has been doomed to live among the waste. After fulfilling its educational role, the skyscraper will be handed over for disposal.
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