eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2019 Skyscraper Competition from a pool of 478 projects. A jury of architects and designers selected three winners and 27 honorable mentions. The annual award recognizes “visionary ideas for building [high-rise] projects 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.” Methanescraper, an energy-producing “vertical landfill” city district concept was crowned the first place winner.

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Rendering of tower with multiple white containers

Serbian designer Marko Dragicevic placed first in the 14th iteration of eVolo’s Skyscraper Competition with “Methanescraper,” a proposal for a city district in Belgrade that serves as a “vertical landfill” for waste and recycling. The district’s towers would be built mainly of waste capsules, modular units that contain sorted trash. Methane gas produced by the decomposition of waste would be extracted by pipes, pumped into storage tanks for filtering and then sent into the generator, where the gas is burned and transformed into electricity used to power the tower and the city.

rendering of silver high-rise with curving sections

In second place is the “Airscraper” by Polish designers Klaudia Gołaszewska and Marek Grodzicki. Taking inspiration from Le Corbusier’s philosophy of houses as “machines for living,” the Airscraper was proposed to help fight air pollution in Beijing. At 2,624 feet, the mixed-use building is envisioned as the Chinese capital’s tallest tower and would contain three types of modules — an Air-Intake module, a Solar-Gain module and a Green-Garden module — arranged around an inner chimney that uses the stack effect to suck in outdoor polluted air for treatment.

Related: The Fire Prevention Skyscraper brings sustainable housing to areas affected by forest fires

rendering of curvy skyscraper on a wild landscape

U.K.-based designers Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi and Yueya Liu designed the third place winner, the “Creature Ark: Biosphere Skyscraper.” Inspired by Noah’s Ark, the designers created a vertical conservation skyscraper for fauna and flora that consists of five simulated ecological environments, from the bottom up: arid, tropical, temperate, continental and polar.

+ eVolo 2019 Skyscraper Competition

Images via eVolo