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