eVolo Magazine

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Skyscraper Competition. The Jury selected 3 winners and 14 honorable mentions from 149 projects received. The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

Honorable Mention 2025 Skyscraper Competition Kim Kyungmin, Hong Yewon, Lee Byeonghyeon South Korea 1. The Landfill as a Forgotten Ground Cities continue to landfill nearly 36% of their waste, generating territories that remain polluted, ecologically severed, and functionally suspended. Although these sites hold latent energy potential, they exist as “frozen ground” detached from the urban system.

Third Place 2025 Skyscraper Competition Danny Elachi Elsaadi, Dima Elachi Elsaadi Saudi Arabia For centuries, Bedouin communities shaped their lives through a deliberate rhythm of movement. Seasonal routes, shared stopping points, and portable dwellings formed a refined spatial system grounded in environmental knowledge and reinforced through oral tradition and craft.

Second Place 2025 Skyscraper Competition Nasim Bakhshinejad, Sheida Ghelichkhany, Alireza Agah, Negar Hashemol Hosseini, Fatemeh Peysepar, Fatemeh Malemir Canada, Italy, United Arab Emirates In an era when the boundary between matter and data has blurred, particles smaller than our imagination can conceive are quietly shaping and eroding the future.

First Place 2025 Skyscraper Competition Changsi Wang United States The Living Refuge addresses one of the most urgent ecological crises in dense urban environments: the accelerating endangerment of pollinator species. In Manhattan—where habitat fragmentation, chemical exposure, and extreme urbanization sharply amplify this decline—the project reframes the skyscraper as a vertical ecological, scientific, and educational infrastructure.

2025 Skyscraper Competition Honorable Mention Daeun Kang, Dongwook Han, Sign Jeong South Korea In contemporary society, individual autonomy and diversity are revered as supreme values. However, this prioritization has paradoxically given rise to the phenomenon of “Hyperindividualism,” creating a stark reality where severance from others and psychological isolation have become prevalent social pathologies.

Honorable Mention 2025 Skyscraper Competition Amirsadra Seddighigildeh, Aria Kakavand, Iman Haji Abolghasemi, Isun Ranjpourazarian, Navid Kakavand, Sahar Safardoost Italy Throughout the entire history of human settlement, our relationship with nature has always oscillated between two opposing states: coexistence and domination.

2025 Skyscraper Competition Honorable Mention Yuyi Shen, Ingrid Liu United States In October 2025, the world passed its first catastrophic climate tipping point—an irreversible threshold that will send sea levels rising with unprecedented acceleration. Many coastal cities, cultural capitals that have flourished for millennia, now face an inevitable future of submersion. Venice—long defined by its relationship to water—stands at the forefront of this crisis.

2025 Skyscraper Competition Honorable Mention Maria Murokh, Daria Bondarchuk Russia Humanity has entered an era in which its presence extends far beyond the boundaries of the atmosphere — yet our expansion into orbit has created an unintended and rapidly escalating crisis. Millions of fragments of old satellites and collision-generated debris now encircle the planet, forming a hazardous shell that threatens spacecraft, space stations, and future missions.

2025 Skyscraper Competition Honorable Mention Nam Anh Nguyen, Gia Linh Pham, Cat Tuong Tran Australia Positioned along the Ve River in Quang Ngai, the project responds directly to the region’s annual cycle of monsoon flooding. Each year, riverbanks transform into wide floodplains as rains, upstream runoff, and tidal backflow converge. These waters repeatedly damage settlements yet also enrich the land, supporting long-standing agricultural and aquaculture practices.