Over the next week we will be publishing previews and snippets from among the submissions to the show.
The first feature is of Andrew Isaac Ng, Daniel Kobran, Max Obata's project exploring historical residence design in order to see how a sense of community can be fostered in a residential tower.
Abstract:
Stephen Emmott in Ten Billion provokes immediate nihilism with regard to our lack of urgency of our rapidly multiplying world, and parenthetically urban, population. But how does architecture immediately assert its agency in provoking typologies to morph and adapt in order to sustain a projective mode of designing in our increasingly dense world? It’s within this framework that the project approaches domesticity and vertical living.Within contemporary residential typology, we are confronted consistently with a very difficult and inconvenient truth: current typologies of vertical living emasculate nearly all forms of community and neighborhood. We can talk about activating ground program, we can interject about pedestrian-centric urban master plans, but the reality remains that we know those within close proximity the lease. The condo, therefore, is much more similar to a hotel than a home; we return for our domestic lives, devoid, ignoring and nonchalant about the transient community around ourselves.
Using the courtyards in Amsterdam as a precedent to examine, the initial work and research was conducted to understand how these existing historical typologies become neighborhood generators. The project fundamentally attempts to achieve two things. First, it minimizes its footprint in order to eliminate the corridor and dissolves the egress stair in hopes of connecting multiple floors within the same space. Secondly, it compresses the units in a smaller scale in order to allow for activity to bleed from the units out into the shared amenity spaces on each floor.