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In the future, drone towers, sustainable skyscrapers and submerged city parks will scatter the globe. At least, that’s what the winners of an annual skyscraper competition think.

The magazine eVolo held its 2016 Skyscraper Competition, an annual contest where architects from all over the world submit their innovative designs for buildings of the future, and the winning designs put a major spin on the modern skyscraper that comes to mind.

This year's winner was a redesign of New York City’s Central Park, but instead of reaching skyward with the park, designers went in another direction. Designed by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, their project the New York Horizon suggests digging below the surface of the current park and recreating a landscape to be seen from the surrounding horizontal skyscraper, according to eVolo.

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Views from the 1,000-foot tall skyscraper encasing the park would have unobstructed views of the scattered mountains and lakes of the renovated landmark. The park’s high perimeter would feature mirrored glass, reflecting the rest of the city’s vast architecture.

In second place, The Hive, a standalone vertical terminal in New York City, would be a control center for delivery drones. Designed by Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifend Zhao and Chengdu Zhu, the drone home base would offer the delivery packages and commercial goods to the residents of the city, barring the future’s lesser drone restrictions.

Third place was awarded to Italian designers Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti for their proposal of the Data Skyscraper in Iceland, an alternative to modern data centers. The tower would act as a massive 3D motherboard, allowing companies to store and process the endless streams of data used daily.

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The design would offer a more efficient alternative to the current data centers that consume high amounts of energy and leave a large carbon footprint. The Data Skyscraper would be a sustainable center, using hydropower and geothermal energy from the country's renewable energy sources to completely power the tower. Heat given off by the tower would also be used to warm nearby homes, according to the Data Tower’s selection page.

Winners of the competition receive $5,000 for first place, $2,000 for second and $1,000 for third, plus the earned media attention, according to Student Competitions.

The competition, which began in 2006, encourages its contestants to find new uses of “technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations” in order to challenge the way we understand current architecture and its relationship with natural and man-made environments.

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