eVolo 2025 Skyscraper Competition Winners Showcase Innovative High-Rises

This article examines eVolo Magazine’s 2025 Skyscraper Competition. It highlights the three prize-winning proposals and 14 honorable mentions from 149 submissions.

The competition marks a turning point in vertical architecture. Tall buildings are now imagined as ecological infrastructures, biodiversity corridors, and adaptable social platforms.

The insights come from a respected jury panel. They reflect ongoing conversations in architecture and engineering about technology, materials, and spatial programs that redefine skyscrapers in urban environments.

eVolo 2025 Skyscraper Competition: Winners Overview

Since 2006, the competition has challenged entrants to push boundaries in form, structure, and function. The 2025 edition focuses on designs that address environmental and social systems through new technologies and assembly strategies.

The jury included Nici Long, Davide Macullo, Juan Pablo Pinto, Wenyuan Peng, and Leonid Slonimskiy. They selected three prize winners and several honorable mentions that emphasize biodiversity, remediation, and mobility.

First Prize — The Living Refuge: A Symbiotic Sanctuary For Humans And The Vanishing Pollinators

The top prize goes to Changsi Wang’s concept—a Manhattan tower reimagined as vertical ecological infrastructure. The design features a 3D‑printed façade that acts as a living skin, with cavities, microclimates, and planting zones to support mosses, lichens, flowering plants, and pollinator nesting habitats.

Inside, the façade’s cavities mimic hollow tree structures. These create vertical ecosystems that retain moisture, accumulate organic matter, and enable species to forage and nest above the ground.

This proposal reframes the skyscraper as a habitat corridor. It supports pollination networks and urban biodiversity while maintaining human occupancy at the tower’s core.

Second Prize — Microbiome Swarm Net

A multinational team led by Nasim Bakhshinejad et al. presents an architecture that behaves like a living organism. It senses, responds to, and degrades microplastic pollution.

Inspired by microbiomes and bacterial swarm intelligence, the design envisions built systems that detect contaminants and coordinate micro-scale processes. These systems initiate remediation pathways within the skyscraper.

The concept embeds adaptive, bioinspired responses into the structure. It turns tall buildings into active participants in urban environmental cleanup.

Third Prize — The Return: Reclaiming The Right To Move

Danny and Dima Elachi Elsaadi propose mobility infrastructure for nomadic communities. Their design combines permanent anchors with temporary tent towers.

These flexible elements provide shelter, water, energy, and connectivity. They preserve the transient settlement patterns of nomadic life.

The design reinterprets vertical space as a place for mobility, social exchange, and cultural continuity. It moves away from the idea of skyscrapers as fixed, exclusive spaces.

Broader Significance and Honorable Mentions

The announced winners highlight architecture’s potential to support biodiversity and remediate pollution. They also show how architecture can reorganize social and territorial systems.

The 14 honorable mentions, though not listed here, illustrate the competition’s focus on regenerative urbanism and modular fabrication. These projects also show adaptive programs that respond to climate challenges and changing urban demographics.

• Vertical ecological infrastructure as a design driver for future towers
• Living facades that create microclimates and habitat zones
• Bioinspired strategies for pollinator support and biodiversity corridors
• Architectures that sense and remediate environmental pollutants
• Nomadic and stationary communities integrated within a single vertical framework
• 3D printing and other advanced fabrication methods enabling complex habitats
• Buildings as active environmental remediation tools rather than passive spaces

For architects and structural engineers, the 2025 winners show a need for new design approaches and material choices. Collaboration is essential to make these concepts into resilient, buildable projects that blend structure, façade, and environmental care.

 
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