Indian architects Suraksha Bhatla and Sharan Sundarfor describe their Shanty Scraper high-rise as ‘a conscious decision to improve the life of squatters … by applying principles of sustainable urbanism.’ It placed second in the design competition sponsored by architectural journal eVolo.
In each year since 2006, the U.S.-based architectural journal eVolo has hosted a competition intended to smoke out the most inventive, original new skyscraper designs in the world.
And quite a few of the world's imaginative people have responded to the call. The 2015 contest attracted no fewer than 480 proposals from all inhabited continents. According to the magazine's website, the high-profile international jury – which included the well-known Italian architect, urbanist and curator Massimiliano Fuksas – was looking for projects that embodied "creativity, ingenuity and understanding of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities."
The judges apparently found these qualities best exemplified in Essence, the first-place winner. Thought up by four Polish designers (Ewa Odyjas, Agnieszka Morga, Konrad Basan and Jakub Pudo), it's a vast, translucent, mile-high block that would rise from New York's Times Square and feature a stack of landscapes, such as jungles and oceans. (Oceans? Go figure.)
Mercifully, Essence will never be built. It is extravagantly mammoth, even by Manhattan standards, and its construction (which is probably impossible and definitely undesirable) would involve vandalizing one of the great spots in urban America.
But to be fair, practical buildability in the real world was apparently not a criterion in eVolo's race. "Creativity" and "ingenuity" were wanted, and contestants obliged with proposals that often soared beyond the limits of the present-day doable.
So what is the point of a competition that sets no real-world limits? The easy answer is that there isn't any point. Inviting architects to submit fantasies with no hope of realization, according to this view, is tantamount to wasting everyone's time.
The problem with such quick dismissal, however, is that every breakthrough skyscraper by the masters of building tall, from Louis Sullivan to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Frank Gehry, started out as something never before seen, never even imagined. Every art needs an occasional dash of utopia. Though the projects it elicited may not radically reshape the contemporary city in the near term, the eVolo exercise occasioned a number of ideas that usefully – and sometimes surprisingly and urgently – challenge conventional orthodoxies about planning and building.
Take, for example, eVolo's second-place finalist. It is a residential high-rise proposal crafted by Indian architects Suraksha Bhatla and Sharan Sundar, and sited alongside the ocean-side shanties of 5,000 families of impoverished fisher-folk in the east-coast Indian city of Chennai.
These families, the designers explain in their brief, are among more than 100 million Indians living in urban slums. The commonest public remedy for this rapidly worsening situation – raising large settlement schemes at the edges of cities – involves distancing people from services and jobs, which, in turn, makes the places unpopular with the families they are supposed to serve.
The team, for their part, would keep the squatters of the district in an urban landscape they recognize and feel at home within, and provide safe, clean shelter in the tall structure they call "Shanty Scraper."
This building would be no modernist concrete slab in the style of nowhere. Quite as ramshackle, dilapidated-looking and jerrybuilt as any of the slum dwellings that surround it, the raffishly handsome tower largely would be a collage from "post-construction debris, such as pipes and reinforcement bars" and from "recycled corrugated-metal sheets, regionally sourced timber and thatch." It would be large, that is, and it might seem strange to Western eyes – although we're becoming familiar with strong vertical segmentation and complex skins in towers by Mr. Gehry and other designers. But the casual vernacular styling might make it fit comfortably into the neighbourhood where Suraksha Bhatla and Sharan Sundar imagine it could go up.
In common with every project submitted to the eVolo competition, of course, Shanty Scraper is an imaginative romp beyond the boundaries of the possible. But unlike some others – and like the most interesting (and controversial) visions of Le Corbusier and other early European modernists – it springs from serious, socially engaged thought about what the city should be.
"As urban planners and architects," the Indian team write in their manifesto, "we must make a conscious decision to improve the life of squatters (shelter, services and livelihood) by applying principles of sustainable urbanism. … Informal settlements and the paucity of land parcels can no longer be ignored, and the complexities of resettlement will force slum dwellers themselves to build higher, using locally available, structurally sound, recyclable materials, [and] accommodating themselves into organized communities."
For more information, visit the eVolo website.