The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat recently announced the annual Best Tall Building Award of Excellence Winners in a number of categories. Koichi Takada Architects’ Arc in Sydney, Sou Fujimoto, Nicolas Laisné and Oxo Architects’ White Tree in Montpellier, France, Heatherwick Studiop’s Eden in Singapore, Studio Gang’s MIRA Tower in San Francisco, WOHA’s Sky Green in Taichung, Taiwan, Zaha Hadid Architects Leeza SOHO in Beijing and One Thousand Museum in Miami, and Safdie Architects’ Raffles City Chongqing in the Chinese city of the same name are only a few of the skyscrapers selected by CTBUH that have been described in Floornature.



Winners of the 2021 CTBUH Best Tall Building Awards

On January 20 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) announced its annual “Best Tall Building Award of Excellence Winners” in a number of categories. The world’s best skyscrapers were announced in five categories defined by height (under 100 metres, between 100 and 199 metres, between 200 and 299 metres, between 300 and 399 metres, and over 400 metres) and the three categories defined according to function (offices, mixed-use and residential buildings). The winners in engineering, construction, interior design, urban habitat and all the other categories of the awards will be announced in the weeks to come.
All the selected skyscrapers qualify for the final phase of the competition and are eligible to win the first prize in each category and the top award, “2021 Overall Best Tall Building Worldwide”. According to a well-established tradition, the final stage in the awards will take place during the CTBUH’s annual conference, the 2021 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference, scheduled for May 18-20, 2021. In view of the uncertain situation of global travel as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, the CTBUH has already announced that its annual conference will be held online via a dedicated virtual portal.

Over fifty skyscrapers have won awards in this initial phase of the competition, including many which we have already discussed in the pages of Floornature and now have an opportunity to rediscover.
Koichi Takada Architects’ Arc in Sydney, with its two slender towers covered with handmade terracotta bricks, adds to the series of iconic buildings characterising the city’s skyline.
A bold project combining residential and commercial space in a skyscraper with a strong poetic component and a focus on the human dimension, Arbre Blanc (White Tree) by Sou Fujimoto, Nicolas Laisné and Oxo Architects is located in Montpellier, France.
Two “green” skyscrapers won awards in the Best Tall Building 100-199 metres category: Heatherwick Studios’ EDEN in Singapore, inspired by Lee Kuan Yew’s idea of "a city in a garden", and WOHA’s Sky Green in Taichung, Taiwan, considered the first specimen of a sustainable high-density mixed-use building with walls covered in vegetation. In the same category, Studio Gang’s MIRA Tower in San Francisco is a spiral-shaped skyscraper rising approximately 130 metres into the air with its "aerospace" façade.
The winners in the Best Tall Building 200-299 metres category include two projects by Zaha Hadid Architects, the Leeza SOHO in Beijing and the One Thousand Museum in Miami. Both skyscrapers fall into the context of the architectural studio’s research in the area of buildings with large internal surfaces free of structural elements.
Lastly, Raffles City Chongqing by architect Moshe Safdie is a project on an urban scale in the city of Chongqing, China selected among the winners in the “Best Tall Building 300-399 metres” category.

(Agnese Bifulco)


2021 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference 18-21 May 2021/ Virtual 

Image captions

(01) Arc by Koichi Takada Architects
(02) Arbre Blanc (White Tree) by Sou Fujimoto, Nicolas Laisné and Oxo Architects
(03) Eden by Heatherwick Studio
(04) MIRA Tower by Studio Gang
(05) Sky Green by WOHA
(06) Leeza SOHO by Zaha Hadid Architects
(07) One Thousand Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects
(08) Raffles City Chongqing by Safdie Architects
(09) Logo CTBUH


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