Prefabrication experiments - 436 - XL(towers) - Stacked dwellings

 

Skewering identical floor plates on a vertical axis is the most common way of building dwelling towers. The inhabitable hives are optimized by aggregating units effectively around centralized service cores. Composing tall buildings with variable floorplates, while certainly less commonplace, has inspired many architectural proposals based on adaptable floors conceived as free indeterminate spaces tuned to present needs as well as being adjustable to change over time.

 

The tension between pragmatic building strategies and individualizable housing needs arguably also led to the invention of both the megastructure tower and the development of open building theory. SITE architects' evocative representation Highrise of Homes (1981) or Elmer Frey’s stacked mobile homes, both represent the underlying duality of any collective housing scheme of according common and private functions. The floor plate designed as infrastructure for any organizational scheme harmonizes these parameters and inspired examples of the support versus infill patterns related to Habraken's visions for mass housing.

 

Isay Weinfeld, IW Arquitetura's 360° tall building in São Paulo, Brazil is a contemporary vision of particularizing tower geometry with varying and open slabs. Each storey is composed of large spanning reinforced concrete, onsite cast, waffle slabs cantilevered from a rigorous grid of columns and central service core. Each floor is infilled with modularly organized flats shifted from one floor to the next in a pinwheel composition to enhance the tower’s dynamic form. Further, the 62 units are massed to create voids identified by their designers as yards revealing a vertical urban plan imagery for the tower. 

 

The stacking of identical units into an accommodating slab frame makes it possible to manufacture systems as completely replicable chunks without the habitual reinforcing required for lower modular units or elements to support their vertical neighbouring units. The 360° tower demonstrates the enduring architectural attraction for customizing interiors in a structure as a service rack of endless possibilities. This approach, while distant from Japanese Metabolists’ complete plug and play theories reveals how Sites' representation of an ideal customizable vertical city is still a forceful fantasy in architectural culture. 

top left: Highrise of Homes; top right: stacked mobile homes; bottom: 360° Tower

Prefabrication experiments - 435 - XL(towers) - Taller is better

 

Occupant protection is a fundamental purpose of housing. Defensive posture is usually defined by how a home is anchored to its locus. Dugout or elevated, position relative to ground plane symbolizes how humans delineate their territory and how they interact with other humans; The need to observe surroundings, showcase one's wealth or power, and dominate the environment stimulated the development of the tower house type. Cities in the middle-ages were stages of power struggles represented by the multiplication of elevated dwellings as devices for celebrating a family's wealth - taller was always better.

 

Verticality as an expression of wealth and power took on a manifestly modern connotation as new materials and construction methods made it possible to reach greater heights and spans unlocking a potential for spaces, commercial or residential, to be stacked democratizing what had been theretofore limited to the ultra-wealthy. Mechanization, steel, reinforced concrete and light curtain walls unleashed new industrial energies. The tower became a symbol of urbanity powering new cities into the twentieth century no longer related to one family. Granted, many private promoters and construction magnates were still sometimes controlled by a family who continued to prove their influence by harnessing resources and deploying them into magnificently tall buildings. 

 

The tower as a multi-unit dwelling typology is straightforward: flats are distributed, aggregated and piled around a central core containing mechanical distribution and circulation. Flat typologies, anchored to a core, can be one, two and sometimes three stories high with single, dual, triple or quadruple orientations depending on the core-to-flat configuration. The typical floor plate repeating the systemic relationship from floor to floor makes these edifices conducive to rationalized construction methods. 

 

Modular volumetric construction has been proposed, marginally applied and offers a glimpse into the strategy's potentials and limitations. While certainly formidable in terms of speed of construction, in conventional systems, lower boxes carry the weight of upper boxes. Tall prefab and modular construction using repetitive units imply the use of an expressed or hidden support structure or the particularized reinforcement of each manufactured box, which makes the seemingly simple stacking challenging in terms of mass production and can also increase construction costs. 

above: Bologna tower houses; below: Capsule tower by Kisho Kurokawa