Prefabrication, mass production and industrialized building systems cultivated the potential of a new architectural language; the repetition of components, compositions or elements over a standardized grid became iconic of modernism and its modularity. One step further, these same concepts underwrote the international style that led to the erection of similar looking buildings in every city. A globalized representation of capitalism, the curtain wall tower manifested newness based on architectural and industrial integration. Many reacted to this sameness, most strongly, in reaction to how people could live in vertical towers devoid of individuality. An enduring approach created from this reaction is the open building theory founded on John Habraken's theories of a more authentic relationship to building which inscribed the duality of collective and personal elements as two necessary systems of housing blocks. Supports (collective) and infill (individual) founded many experiments where edifices no longer reflected a generic sameness but argued for individual expression outlined by a shared framework.
A fascinating tower project demonstrating this type of response is Gaetano Pesce's Pluralistic tower designed for Sao Paolo, Brazil in the late 1980s. Pesce envisioned the tower as «superimposed territories (platforms) equipped with the necessary services that may be bought by different owners who, with the help of other architects decide how to design the outer “skin” and the internal arrangement of every floor, with the result that a highly innovative building is created». In appearance, a complete rebuttal of modernist values, the tower expresses the distinctiveness of its inhabitants through systemic variability. It is based on a collective structure, a tall megastructure of floorplates, onto which individuals could dictate what their part of the tower would look like; a vertical urban plan with a programmed constructive freedom. A powerful manifesto, the un-built tower underscored a willingness to combine industrial potentials with design freedom. This pluralist concept while in line with Pesce's vision of distinctiveness in architecture also continues to display the difficult relationship architects entertain with mass housing: a continuous alternation between determined or undetermined arrangements. It remains to be seen how current housing needs will swing the architectural pendulum.
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| Pluralist Tower model |
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