Evolo Skyscraper Competition
Cultural Ascension
The Skyscraper as an Inducer of Social Change
“I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions." - Graham Hancock
For this project, I wanted to take a unique perspective on a global problem, sustainability. The sustainability of the human species is at a crossroads, our current practices are not conducive to our survival. We know this, have the data to back it up, widely accept it as true, and yet people are not waking up and changing how they live. It is a cultural delusion. I started my research by trying to understand what is stopping people from making real change when we know what the cause the problem is. What is causing us to deny our negative impact on the world around us?
I saw this as an issue of connection between cause and effect, or rather, when speaking about sustainability, the disconnection between the two. There is no direct effect on us when a piece of trash is tossed to the side of the road, or an old iPhone is discarded. We let go of it and it is gone from our lives and from our minds. There is no immediate pain, no sensation that tells us it is wrong, no immediate consequence of our action. The environmental consequences of our decisions come much father down the road, years later, disconnected from the original action. So how can we make people more aware of the effect they are having on the world around them? The problem moves away from the awareness of an issue and becomes one more about visualization.
In the city, the skyscraper is the ultimate symbol of our current culture. It is also arguably the strongest visual element left behind by humans. So what does this mean? It can become the visual element that is so desperately needed to expose the cultural delusion we are currently living within. By using the skyscraper as the framework for awareness, it can become the visualization of our connection to the environment and help us recognize the negative impact we are having on the environment.
By measuring the sustainable qualities of a city and giving this intangible data a tangible form, an unbiased cultural monument is created. The monuments’ generative qualities allow for it to continually take inputs from the surrounding city and consciously processes that data into new form. Slowly rising to become the tallest structure in the city, Cultural Ascension is a representation of the way we live our everyday lives, creating awareness and inducing social change.