Each year eVolo Magazine hosts a competition soliciting new visions for vertical living. This year’s iteration of the nine-year-old Skyscraper Competition received 525 projects from 43 countries. Out of this vast field, three winners were announced with Yong Ju Lee of New York–based firm E/B Office taking first prize for his project Vernacular Versatility.

The winning design looks to the traditional domestic architecture of its creator’s homeland. Lee’s building uses the beam and girder system of the curved roofs commonly found on Korean Hanoks in order to construct a contemporary skyscraper.

Second place went to Mark Talbot and Daniel Markiewicz for their Car and Shell Skyscraper: Or Marinetti’s Monster, a vertical suburb that arrived with a bombastic manifesto in the mode of its futurist namesake and all the plug-in trappings and immense scale of mega-structural architecture.

YuHao Liu and Rui Wu of Canada took third with Propogate Skyscraper: Carbon Dioxide Structure. Their approach harnesses carbon dioxide gases in order to generate a material that allows the building to grow organically around a basic guiding framework.

Many of the highly theoretical entries seem to be essentially exercises in sleek and sexy renderings, but provide food for thought none the less. Twenty additional submissions were tabbed for honorable mention by a jury consisting of Wiel Arets (principal Wiel Arets Architects, dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture), Derek Pirozzi (architectural designer Oppenheim Architecture and winner of 2013’s competition), Carol Willis (director Skyscraper Museum, professor at Columbia University), and Dan Wood (principal WORK Architecture Company, professor at Yale University) among others. Competition winner Lee will receive a $5000 prize and a press kit from competition sponsor v2com. The honorable mentions are featured below.