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