VERTICAL CITY YIXIN ZHANG
Instructed by Anna Neimark
© 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission of copyright owner
CONTENTS
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Research+ References
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Thesis statement
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Thesis terms
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Situation about HONGKONG
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Architecture collections
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Experiments of vertical city
BIBLIOGRAPHY
STATEMENT TERMS
SITUATION
PRECEDENTS
EXPERIMENTATION
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01 BIBLOGRAPHY Gang, J. Wanted: Tall buildings less iconic, more specific. In Proceedings of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 3–5 March 2008. Ali, M.M.; Armstrong, P.J. From cityscape to skyscraper: The changing character of cities. In Proceedings of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Shanghai, China, 19–21 September 2012. Canizaro, V. Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writing onPlace, Identity, Modernity, andTradition; Princeton Architectural Press: New York, NY, USA, 2007. Alexander, C. 1987. A newtheory of urbandesign. New York: Oxford University Press.2002. American Planning Association. 1999. Planning communities for the 21st century. Washington, DC: Author. Benevolo, L. 1980. The history of the city. Translated by Geoffrey Culverwell. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boyden,S., S.Millar,K. Newcombe,andB.O’Neill.1981.Theecologyofacityanditspeople:ThecaseofHongKong.Canberra,Australia: Australian National University Press.
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02 STATEMENT Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. In a sense, it is a vertical city. Apartments and offices stretch toward the sky, and the city of 7 million is three-times more dense than New York with nearly 7,000 residents per square kilometer. Not only HongKong, the whole world’s population is growing rapidly with more and more people concentrated in cities. We know this trend as urbanization. More people live in urban regions than in rural areas. In 1950, it was only 30 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. In 2014, the percentage has increased where we have 54 percent of the world’s population are urban dwellers. By 2050, it has been projected that 66 percent of the world’s population will be urbanized (United Nations 2014). As a result, the concept of the vertical city has gradually begun to be regarded as a solution to this growing and unavoidable problem. A vertical city is the entire human habitat contained in a huge skyscraper. Vertical cities are key to addressing overpopulation and overcrowding. They can be placed in vertical towers to protect the environment instead of destroying forests and swamps to build houses, shopping centers, and factories. High-altitude buildings increase the available living and working space, thereby reducing the impact of overpopulation. In vertical cities, people live, work and go to school. Vertical towers are also key to maintaining natural resources.
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03 TERMS Infrastructure Landmark Context Modular Circulation Top-down Bottom-up
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04 SITUATION
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As one of the world’s most densely packed places, Hong Kong is a vertical city. Apartments and offices stretch toward the sky, and the city of 7 million is three-times more dense than New York with nearly 7,000 residents per square kilometer. In its densest district, Kwun Tong, 57,000 people crowd every square kilometer of land.
The people who live in these unregulated conditions suffer greatly. They are often bitten by bugs and mice that share their caged homes. They have high levels of respiratory disease as well as mental health problems. When fires break out, the subdivided apartments can become death traps. Over 200,000 people are on waiting lists to get out of such conditions and live in regulated public housing, but many of them will wait for years.
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This density means that housing space comes at a premium. Landlords often subdivide flats so that they can cram in more residents (and make more money). An estimated 50,000 people live in 2-meter long cages stacked on top of each other for around $200 a month. Others live in plywood boxes – called “coffins” – stacked one on top of the other in subdivided apartment rooms. Shanty towns of homes with plywood walls and corrugated iron roofs are also sprouting on the tops of already over-crowded apartment buildings.
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Kowloon Walled City, situated next to the old Hong Kong International Airport, was an incredible megablock of urban/architectural configuration occupying an area of approximately 200 by 150 metres. Most of the 500 buildings in the City, housing almost 50,000 residents, were built between 1965 and 1985. This March marks 20 years from their demolition.
It took Adolfo Arranz one month to draw and organise the information graphic on Hong Kong’s “den of sin”, the Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in the early 1990s. At its most crammed, some 500 buildings stood on the 2.7-hectare squatter camp, housing 50,000 people.
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A slender steel structure supports 84 horizontal planes, all the size of the original plot. Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site, as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single country house and its attendant facilities, stable, servants’ cottages, etc. Villas on the 84 platforms display a range of social aspiration from the rustic to the palatial; emphatic permutations of their architectural styles, variations in gardens, gazebos and so on, create at each elevator stop a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack.
Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan’ posits New York as the arena for the terminal stage of Western civilisation. Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850 on, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion.
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One illustration from the 1870s shows a transit system of air powered tubes suspended 24 feet overground, while another plan shows underground tunnels for fast moving cars, one level below slower moving vehicles.
Never Built New York, compiled by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, shows off nearly 200 different proposals of landmarks like Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, Ellis Island, and the Museum of Modern Art.
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1. The major programmatic components are distributed in horizontal bands across the site, creating a continuous atmosphere in its length and perpendicular, rapid change in experience. 2. Some facilities - kiosks, playgrounds, barbecue spots are distributed mathematically according to different point grids. VERTICAL CITY 22
3. The addition of a “round forest� as architectural elements. 4. Connections 5. Superimposition
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MULTI - FUNCTION THE VERTICAL VILLAGE - MVRDV
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PRECEDENTS Is there an alternative to this process? Can one imagine a new model for the development of East Asian cities? Can these areas be densified in such a way that the qualities of the traditional village are preserved and enriched?
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These urban villages form mostly intense and socially highly connected communities, with enormous individual identities and differentiations. One can speak of urban ecologies, communities that have evolved over the course of centuries. Their faceless replacements packed with identical apartment units offer a Western standard of living at an affordable price, but at the expense of differentiation, flexibility and individual expression.
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IDEA VERTICAL CAMPUS We have liberated an eloquent, communicative, original ‘form’ from the prismatic volume that is the raw material of all contemporary architecture. Because some of the original volume is still present, our building effortlessly associates itself with its neighbors; because it is the only ‘liberated form’ it will effortlessly attract attention, cause amazement, and inspire awe.
Most buildings are generated through ‘Addition’. All the necessary parts are assembled, adjusted, accumulated in more or less pleasing compositions. Shinjyuku Vertical Campus is generated by ‘Subtraction’; like Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’.
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(W)EGO CITY
Ego City explores participatory design processes through gaming to model the competing desires and egos of each inhabitant in a housing block, and designs their apartments accordingly in the fairest way possible.
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The project aspires to construct, in urbanised and dense conditions, a participative dream — a living mosaic that contains an unlimited amount of desired situations, exploring the possibility of self-sufficient living and adjustable sizes/types of one’s personal living space.
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DIAGRAM
The Vertical Village
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Idea Vertical Campus
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(W)Ego City
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CIRCULATION MIRADOR - MVRDV The slits in between the blocks act as access zones and are conceived as vertical alleys. Their transformation along each itinerary agglomerates the compendium of typologies that are structured like small suburbs. It leads to a vertical sequence of stairs, halls, platforms, and streets. It creates a vertical neighbourhood. It becomes the reference point of the neighbourhood.
Mirador is a collection of mini neighbourhoods stacked vertically around a semi-public sky-plaza. The building acts as a counterpoint against the massive uniformity of the surrounding housing blocks. It frames the distant landscape of the Guadarrama Mountains through a large ‘look out’ located 40 meters above the ground. This also provides outdoor space and community garden for the occupants of building, monumentalising public life and space.
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THE CHILD AND THE VERTICAL CITY Primary public circulation is via the three metre wide central ramp - distinguished by the black and white stripes of an eternal zebra crossing. Secondary circulation provides a screened layer of semi-public frontages to the apartments, offices and public amenities. A tertiary self-contained route is just for children, connecting their bedrooms - perhaps through a secret door in the wardrobe - and running along the rooftops of the units underneath.
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The continuing housing crisis provides an opportunity to re-examine post-war ideas about how to accommodate the city’s workers and their families in our increasingly vertical city. This proposal for a 32 storey tower revisits ‘streets-in-the-sky’ as articulated by the Smithson’s and other architects of that era and takes the theory to its absolute zenith with a one mile long continuous street spiralling upwards through its interior.
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DIAGRAM
Mirador
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VERTICAL CITY The child and the Vertical City
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MODULAR HABITAT 67 Habitat 67, designed by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie as the Canadian Pavilion for the World Exposition of 1967, was originally intended as an experimental solution for high-quality housing in dense urban environments. Safdie explored the possibilities of prefabricated modular units to reduce housing costs and allow for a new housing typology that could integrate the qualities of a suburban home into an urban high-rise.
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The prefabrication process of the 90-ton boxes took place on-site. The basic modular shape was molded in a reinforced steel cage, which measured 38 x 17 feet. Once cured, the concrete box was transferred to an assembly line for the insertion of electrical and mechanical systems, as well as insulation and windows. To finalize the production, modular kitchens and bathrooms were installed, and finally a crane lifted each unit to its designated position.
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Habitat 67 was constructed from 354 identical and completely prefabricated modules (referred to as “boxes”) stacked in various combinations and connected by steel cables. The apartments vary in shape and size, since they are formed by a group of one to four of the 600 square-foot “boxes” in different configurations. Each apartment is reached through a series of pedestrian streets and bridges, along with three vertical cores of elevators for the top floors. Service and parking facilities are separated from the tenant’s circulation routes, located on the ground floor.
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PRECEDENTS The Interlace, one of the largest and most ambitious residential developments in Singapore, presents a radically new approach to contemporary living in a tropical environment. Instead of creating a cluster of isolated, vertical towers – the default typology of residential developments in Singapore – the design proposes an intricate network of living and social spaces integrated with the natural environment.
THE INTERLACE - OMA Designed by Ole Scheeren, partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), The Interlace breaks away from Singapore’s standard typology of isolated, vertical apartment towers and instead explores a dramatically different approach to tropical living: an expansive interconnected network of living and communal spaces integrated with the natural environment. Thirty-one apartment blocks, each six-stories tall and identical in length, are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement to form eight large-scale open and permeable courtyards. The interlocking blocks form a vertical village with cascading sky gardens and both private and public roof terraces.
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PRECEDENTS Interlace consists of six storey blocks staggered in a hexagonal arrangement surrounding eight courtyards. The blocks are stacked four high at the center to provide a maximum of 24 floors. This provides almost every home with a wide view of the surrounding areas.
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PYRAMID OF APARTMENTS
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CAPSULE HOTELS Built in the Ginza area of Tokyo, a total of 140 capsules are stacked and rotated at varying angles around a central core, standing 14-stories high. The technology developed by Kurokawa allowed each unit to be installed to the concrete core with only 4 high-tension bolts, which keeps the units replaceable. Each capsule measures 4 x 2.5 meters, permitting enough room for one person to live comfortably. The interior space of each module can be manipulated by connecting the capsule to other capsules.
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Architect Kisho Kurokawa was very innovative in his creation of the Nakagin Capsule Tower in 1972, which was the first capsule architecture design. The module was created with the intention of housing traveling businessmen that worked in central Tokyo during the week. It is a prototype for architecture of sustainability and recycleability, as each module can be plugged in to the central core and replaced or exchanged when necessary.
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DIAGRAM
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STRAT
TOP-D & BOTTO
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TEGY
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DOWN & OM-UP
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POTENTIAL ARCHIGRAM
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TOP-DOWN
“A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seem to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to bypass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism.”
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This provocative project suggests a hypothetical fantasy city, containing modular residential units that “plug in” to a central infrastructural mega machine. The Plug-in City is in fact not a city, but a constantly evolving megastructure that incorporates residences, transportation and other essential services--all movable by giant cranes.
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FLIP / CITY
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CONSTRUCTION
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06 EXPERIMENTS
MASSING TEST
STRUCTURE & INFRASTRUCTURE
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SHAPE
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CIRCULATION
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NATION
MASSING TEST In this ‘Vertical city’ project, more consideration is given to the relationship between the massing and the structure. Can these massings be directly assembled into an already perfect structural system like the Lego system? Regarding the structural system, it is a complete structure, containing infrastructure and the basic architectural structure constructed by the government. However, the massing is constructed by people according to their required functions. Each building will be like a street building in a horizontal city with the same scale, same height and same function.
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STRA
GOVERN
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ATEGY
NMENT
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OM-UP
MASSING
Bottom-Up By People Self
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STRUCTURE
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Top-Down By Government
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HONGKONG