Is the future of New York sunken skyscrapers? This an interesting concept that designers and architects came up with for this year's eVolo Skyscraper Competition.

The Winners

This year's competition winner was Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, who came up with a design entitled "New York Horizon." The concept for their submission involved digging up Manhattan's Central Park and surrounding it with a 1,000-foot reflective wall. This wall would create a mirrored "horizontal skyscraper" to reflect the park's greenery. The architects told CNN that there concept was to "reverse the traditional relationship between landscape and architecture"

Other winners included second place The Hive" which was conceived as a response to the rise of drone technology and the inspiration was a tower covered in drones. Third place went to "Data Skyscraper" while other winners were "Return to Nature" and the dystopian design "Cloud Craft.

The competition

Some of the design may be off putting while others are very inventive. The competition is made to invite young architects and designers from around the world to showcase technological and environmental trends or problems. The skyscrapers are designed to identify and respond to these issues.

This year 489 designs were submitted and out of those submissions 3 went on to become finalists and 21 were honorable mentions. The competition has been running for 10 years and started back in 2006 and has since seen over 6,000 projects that envision the future of building high. The amount of submissions has also increased creating a highly competitive competition.

The Future

It's always interesting to see what architects and designers do and where they are working towards. But the question is could these be the future of architecture and could something like Yitan Sun's designs actually be made. That is something that will likely take time to develop and will also take time to actually happen. For now looking at these designs is always inspirational.