Prefabrication experiments - 280 - modular city building - 01 - City Tower

The correlation between a basic construction unit or element and its multiplication or aggregation into whole edifices is the conceptual starting point for connecting prefabrication, design and construction. Known as modular coordination, this modernist canon argues for component interoperability driven by dimensional standards for materials and assemblies. This idea percolated mainstream construction as of the 1930s and still outlines conventional construction coordination and documentation. Although, not as typical, the same posture was and is still sometimes applied to city planning and building.  The Megastructure with interchangeable dwelling units or the platform modular repeatable building such as the panel building in post-war USSR, posited a standardized approach to housing based on mass-produced parts assembled into urban puzzles. 

 

The next ten posts will examine diverse examples and strategies of modular city building, horizontally (mat housing) or vertically (supports and infill) and the infinite number of possibilities in between. The modular approach even led to exploring the building itself as a city or a microcosm of urban life; Louis Kahn's , City Tower (1956), a collaboration with Anne G. Tyng envisioned a parcel in Philadelphia as a towering framework assembled from industrialized parts to construct a vertical mixed-use support structure. City Tower explored a tetrahedral geometry similar to lightweight spaceframes but at a monumental scale and in reinforced concrete. Alexander Graham Bell, Bucky Fuller and Konrad Wachsmann explored and employed the tetrahedron cell (triangular pyramid) as a robust modular unit capable of formal and spatial multiplication generating large spanning structures with minimal weight.  

 

Kahn’s Megastructure would contain all urban functions and evolve as required to become a complete city fragment functioning independently from the urban field and fabric to which it was moored.  This experiment represented a counterproposal to the «generic» international style office towers sprouting in every city. The expression of structure as architecture would showcase a type of potential cityscape open to the environment relating to light and wind as each platform could be either enclosed or open,  built up completely or partially, reproducing the dynamism of a dense city scape in a vertical composition. 

City Tower representation