CityScraper: A Skyscraper Rebuilt as a Municipal Viaduct of Streets, Townhouses and Spiralling Roads

Most towers ask their residents to accept a trade: more height, less street. CityScraper refuses that bargain. Instead of stacking identical floor plates around an elevator core, the project treats the skyscraper as a municipal viaduct, a piece of urban infrastructure that carries roads, terraces, homes, offices, shops, gardens and parking upward in one continuous system. The tower stops being an object in the city and starts behaving like the city itself.

Designed by Alexander Malyshev and recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in CityScraper 2020, the proposal starts from a familiar urban problem. City centres have historically grown outward across the ground plane, even as congestion, density and scarce land push against that model. Malyshev's answer is to extend the city vertically, and to do it with the vocabulary of streets and neighbourhoods rather than the vocabulary of the corporate high-rise.

A Tapered Tower Built from Planted Rings

From a distance, CityScraper reads as a colossal tapered form: a stack of ring terraces planted with shrubs, capped by a broad disc roof and paired cylindrical volumes. The aerial view clarifies the hierarchy. Glass cylinder towers with domed tops rise from a grassy ring roof, lifting the office programme clear of the residential terraces below, while the dense urban grid at the base shows exactly what the project is reacting against.

The rings matter more than the silhouette. Each terrace is a landscaped ledge rather than a sealed floor, so the building's mass is broken into horizontal bands of planting and occupation. It is a deliberate move away from the uniform façade that usually gives a skyscraper its single, monumental image.

Gabled Townhouses Lining an Elevated Street

This is the project's most persuasive image. Colourful, gabled townhouses sit along the edge of a curved, tree-lined terrace, and cars move along the upper loop above them. The scale shift is striking: small, house-like façades set against a glazed tower and the sweep of a megastructure. Malyshev's stated aim is to give inhabitants the impression of a city street lined with small houses whose proportions and details feel familiar.

That ambition carries real weight. Vertical density is usually framed as a numbers problem, how many units fit on how little land. CityScraper reframes it as a question of identity and comfort: can someone living hundreds of metres up still have a front door on a street, a neighbour across the way, a sense of belonging to a neighbourhood rather than a floor? The townhouses are the project's argument that the answer could be yes.

Serpentine Roads Borrowed from Mountain Passes

The circulation logic comes from an unexpected source: winding highways in mountainous terrain, where serpentine roads negotiate steep changes in elevation through repeated curves. Malyshev transfers that principle to the tower, wrapping a curved road system around and through the structure so that the building becomes destination, circulation network and terrain at once.

The axonometric section makes the organisation legible. Colour coding separates the shopping mall, apartments, offices and parking, with retail and leisure forming an internal public core. A road detail and vehicle movement diagram show how traffic climbs the building in broad loops. It is the drawing that turns the renders from atmosphere into a working proposition, revealing that the domestic streets above depend on a carefully stacked infrastructure beneath.

Where the Terraces Meet the Canal and the Bridge

The low-angle view isolates the architecture of the rings themselves: red-brown terrace edges, planted overhangs and the oval disc roof floating above. The repetition creates rhythm without monotony, because each band is read as a landscape ledge rather than a storey line.

The final image grounds the tower. Red-roofed townhouses on the curved terraces look over a canal and stepped embankment, while a cable-stayed pylon marks the bridge connections that tie the structure to its surroundings. This is where the proposal's claim to be infrastructure rather than object becomes most convincing; the tower plugs into waterways, crossings and the skyline instead of standing apart from them.

Why This Project Matters

CityScraper is a provocation more than a construction document, and its value lies in the questions it puts on the table. By borrowing the serpentine road and the municipal viaduct, it suggests that the skyscraper could absorb the systems usually spread across the ground plane, from mobility to parking to public retail, and in doing so reduce the pressure on land at street level.

More importantly, it insists that extreme density need not erase domestic scale. The gabled houses, planted terraces and elevated streets are a reminder that people experience a city at the scale of a doorstep, not a skyline. Whether or not a tower like this is ever built, Malyshev's proposal makes a compelling case that vertical urbanism should be designed from the street up as much as from the structure out.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Alexander Malyshev

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Project credits: CityScraper by Alexander Malyshev CityScraper 2020 (uni.xyz).