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The 2023 eVolo Skyscraper Competition awarded first place to Nomad Metropolises, a concept for mobile modular housing; second to Ocean Re-clamation Skyscraper, a proposal to collect and recycle ocean waste; and third to K8 Forest Lift Off, a rainforest-focused concept for biodiversity monitoring and water management. They are speculative designs, not built projects or proven interventions.
eVolo announced the results on May 8, 2023: the jury selected three winners and 15 honorable mentions from 309 submissions. The annual competition, established in 2006, recognizes visionary ideas that challenge how people understand vertical architecture and its relationship with natural and built environments. Its scope is deliberately speculative: as New Atlas noted in its June 20, 2023 coverage, the competition does not center ordinary project constraints such as planning permission, budgets, construction costs, or safety.
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The three winning entries imagine very different uses for skyscraper-scale design: a mobile home system, a moving ocean-cleanup structure, and a forest-protection framework. Their stated purposes and features describe what the designers proposed—not outcomes validated through construction or testing.
First place: Nomad Metropolises
Chufeng Wu, Chang Lu, Bozhi Zheng, Duo Wang, and Shuxiao Zhang designed Nomad Metropolises as a mobile city whose inhabitants would move between locations together, rather than migrate as individuals. The proposal centers on residential and service modules that plug into stations, connect to existing infrastructure, and can be combined or replaced over time. Water transport or inland trucks would move the modules.
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The concept treats housing as a flexible system that could travel with its residents. The official project description presents this as a design ambition; it does not establish that such a city or transport network exists in operation.
Second place: Ocean Re-clamation Skyscraper
Dennis Byun, Harry Tse, and Sunjoo Lee proposed a mobile oceanic skyscraper that would move along the Pacific Garbage Patch to collect and recycle garbage. New Atlas describes a design that would use plastic recovered from ocean waste and a filtering and recycling system.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchIn this proposal, the structure is both a platform for collection and part of a waste-recycling concept. The available project coverage does not show that the structure was built or that its cleanup method was tested, so its environmental impact remains an intended function rather than a demonstrated result.
Third place: K8 Forest Lift Off
Ahmad Hafez and Hamzeh Al-Thweib designed K8 Forest Lift Off for the Amazon Rainforest. The official entry frames it as a development model intended to prioritize ecosystem health and biodiversity. It proposes using drones to monitor and research biodiversity and to support water-resource management. New Atlas also describes tree-shaped towers, greenery, and water storage as elements of the concept.
These features position the design as a proposed framework for observation and resource management, not deployed forest-protection infrastructure. The sources do not report measured conservation outcomes.
How the three proposals differ
| Winning concept | Problem it aims to address | System it imagines |
|---|---|---|
| Nomad Metropolises, first place | Housing and mobility | Residential and service modules that connect to infrastructure and move between places. |
| Ocean Re-clamation Skyscraper, second place | Marine pollution | A mobile structure intended to collect and recycle ocean waste. |
| K8 Forest Lift Off, third place | Rainforest conservation | A proposed system for biodiversity monitoring and water management, with tree-shaped towers and water storage described in New Atlas coverage. |
This comparison is about design intent, not relative effectiveness. The cited descriptions do not provide comparative costs, engineering validation, construction status, safety analyses, or quantified environmental performance.
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What the competition recognition does—and does not—tell you
Placement identifies the jury’s ranking among the 2023 entries; it is not evidence that a proposal is practical, funded, approved, built, or successful in the field. The competition invites ideas that stretch the possibilities of vertical architecture, which is why its winning concepts can be discussed as visions without treating their ambitions as verified results.
The results discussed here belong specifically to the 2023 edition, not the latest edition. eVolo’s archive records a 2025 winners announcement dated February 27, 2026.
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Sources
- eVolo Magazine: Winners 2023 Skyscraper Competition (May 8, 2023), results and competition context.
- eVolo Magazine: Nomad Metropolises (May 8, 2023), first-place project description.
- New Atlas: “Incredible competition imagines skyscraper design without constraints” (June 20, 2023), coverage of the winning concepts.
- eVolo Magazine: K8 Forest Lift Off (May 8, 2023), third-place project description.
- eVolo Magazine competition archive, including the later-edition chronology.
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