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MBIArch Notes: Verticalscapes

Architectural Design

INTRODUCTION

The concept of park emerged when someone drew a sinusoidal path across a virgin fragment of nature and discovered how attractive it could be when the directions of the eye and the feet never coincided, when the paths surrounded the object of vision and constructed a scenery of the gaze and a ballet based on the motor function of the body. This interest in experience that emerged as an aesthetic issue based on empiricism in the late 18th century was reworked a hundred years later by modernity with the introduction of these paths into buildings: Le Corbusier aptly called them promenades architecturales and ran them through his projects, which thereby became cinematic still lifes, creating, inside his architectures, a duplicate of the picturesque garden. Landscape-windows joined and separated the two: outside, framed gardens; inside, Cubist still lifes—the two sides of a conception that gave the ballet and the sinusoidal stage set a third dimension.

Today, the verticalscape aspires to construct a hybrid entity which, due to inertia, we momentarily continue to call vertical construction or “architecture”. This vertical “entity” is an amalgam, a material at once natural and artificial, which seeks to construct a similar experience to what our modern masters called public space, technifying its sinusoidal connection to this end. By so doing, generally folded around itself, it not only generates a different spatial modality that can be manipulated to construct hybrid architecture programs for culture, leisure and production, it also generates self-sufficient entities, energy parks that use wind, water, light or the earth as active materials in construction, capable of generating and storing energy, and at the same time serving as public and economic resources. In the urban context, the verticalscape aims to be a catalyst that renders the historic or modern fabric contemporary, in both the formal and the social or cultural realms.

What we are seeing with the verticalscape is the simultaneous, synchronized dissolution of the two high points of modernity—the high-rise and the urban park—as intrinsically “opposite” moments: the dissolution, then, of the essential modern dualisms: city/country, centre/periphery, culture/industry—the dissolution of the dichotomies once set out and now deactivated.

This vertical amalgam is, in short, a new entity, a new construct in keeping with a new perception and a new notion of space: an entity directed at establishing new dialogues between humans and non-humans, and erecting a new “parliament of things”, in the words of Bruno Latour (whose influence is not in-considerable). The verticalscape is an exceptional representation of the necessary integration of architecture, landscape and environment; in a way, it represents the culmination. Therein lies its interest: it is at once the final crystallization and the origin of a “thermodynamic” understanding of space capable of merging together three disciplines—architecture, landscape, environment—in a new synthesis with technological, cultural and urban powers that must now be explored by academic laboratories to try out a new way of understanding the discipline.

VERTICALSCAPES: SEVEN WORKING HYPOTHESES

As a working outline for our laboratory we could propose the following hypothesis: compared to the high-rises of modernity, verticalscapes have seven new characters that need to be analyzed and felt, both in isolation and in the context of contemporary metropolises:

1. The verticalscape is a new spatial modality, a proto-typology that we can define as the meeting point between three disciplines that modernity regarded as different: architecture, landscape and environment, a confluence that also represents an experiment with the shape of the contemporary city and the practices of urban design. As opposed to the modern high-rise as the product of combining technical inventions and a new organization of work (Taylorism), the verticalscape proposes an organic synthesis of the three disciplines, involving a new organization and critique of modern knowledge. It is a synthesis seen in the contemporary field of science as a new biotechnology, the unification of exact, natural and social sciences (Ilya Prigogine), addressed in terms of architecture theory by Sanford Kwinter.

The development of this biotechnology presupposes some basic principles. Firstly, the construction of a new lexicon that prevents the predominance of any one of the old disciplines over the others. As well as being verbal, this new lexicon must also be procedural—that is, it must develop new procedural protocols, new design techniques.

Secondly, it prompts us to address as a priority field of operation those situations/problems/conflicts that no one of the three disciplines with its traditional methodological apparatus is capable of successfully addressing, thereby defining fields of design that are new in terms of both program and of scale and social or urban purpose.

2. The verticalscape is based on a new concept of combined programming and materiality, not as the addition of different programs such as offices, dwellings, shops, etc. that coexist in order to optimize the commercial operation of verticality (the modern high-rise), but as a mix of different activities/flows of the humans and the non-humans that interchange, manage and/or produce resources and energy, forming rings of exchange among themselves and with the supporting infrastructures. The logic of organization of mixed uses in the modern high-rise comprises three fronts: the property business, with commercial interests that habitually lead to an increasing gradient of greater privacy (the higher the more private); urban functionality as a way of solving problems in the metropolis by reducing mobility (e.g. Ludwig Hilberseimer’s vertical city), and the monumental fantasy of reproducing the city in a building (Louis H. Sullivan’s Auditorium Building in Chicago). In the verticalscape, meanwhile, the organizational logic of mixed public and private uses is addressed in terms of thermodynamic criteria: the optimization of exchange with the exterior climate and energy self-sufficiency based on the mix of public and private, active and inert, human and non-human uses working in conjunction. The concept of shared energy groups together different uses and complementary energy demands to design “rings of exchange” that are coordinated among themselves and with the city in which they operate. The introduction of a dimension of landscape and environment into the structure of the verticalscape radically changes the way the form and program are designed, but it also means a new conception of material. The active skin allowing interchange between the exterior and interior and the inert mass as energy storage contribute a technical characteristic based on a dual material conception (passive and active), a duality reinforced by the new combination that supposes the coordinated manipulation of natural and artificial materials.

3. The verticalscape sees verticality as a resource for optimizing energy. The modern high-rise is a homogeneous vertical extrusion that is ineffective both from a mechanical/ structural viewpoint and in terms of energy because it does not explore the thermodynamic powers of its vertical imprint. The first reconsideration of the modern prism came as a result of the structural inefficiency of its grid structures when adapting to the influence of the wind, the most important structural factor in high-rise construction. Since the appearance of this typology, variations have been made in the section of the high-rise in attempts to optimize its behaviour in wind and, after World War II, by investigating more complex ways of harnessing its potential energy. Later, in the 1970s, mechanical/structural optimization came to be studied based on the thermodynamic powers of verticality, with implications absent from the tradition of the low-rise typology that informed the body of thermodynamic knowledge of previous architecture. Changes of section were gradually introduced and in the 1970s their effects were studied in wind tunnels, new passive resources which control air flow, such as solar chimneys, systems of wind acceleration using the Venturi effect, ailerons on rooftops to optimize wind turbines in the 1990s, etc. For the vertical-scape to be self-sufficient also requires techniques that allow the integration of geothermal energy and deep foundations, along with the recirculation of surface water or groundwater to create constant temperatures in the interior, façades and roofs designed as solar collectors and also collectors of daylight and CO2. Air, sunlight, the earth and water are, then, integrated as decisive construction materials in the conception of the verticalscape as a self-sufficient thermodynamic constructive entity. Finally, at city scale, thanks to the densification and mix of uses, it incorporates services (district heating and cooling, data centres, public transport interchanges, etc.), turning the verticalscape into a collective facility at the urban scale. Verticality thereby becomes a holistic technique that globalizes the urban phenomenon.

4. The verticalscape works with a new proportion and arrangement. The modern high-rise tends to compete in terms of height, based on a typical floor plan with a shallow bay suited to programs of offices and/ or dwellings, making the building’s slenderness central to its form. The verticalscape, with the incorporation of advanced techniques of climate control and new public uses, creates greater depth, seeking a more cubic or amorphous proportion, neither too wide nor too high, based on a new way of seeing artificial space. The increased technology of the 1960s and ‘70s ushered in a series of deeper typologies that were independent of the façade, with the Centre Pompidou as the monumental expression of this concept of flexible container. The amalgam of the modern high-rise and the universal container of the 1960s and ‘70s now determines the verticalscape as an agreement between depth and height. This agreement allows for other mechanisms, inside and out, that transform the experience of verticality into a kind of dialogue between humans and non-humans. The verticalscape can be dated at the superposition of revisions of the park and the high-rise that occurs in OMA’s (failed) twofold project for Paris: the Parc de la Villette (1982- 1983) and the Bibliothèque Nationale (1989). Compared with those designed 60 years previously by Le Corbusier for Paris, also failed but to a large extent catalysts of the entire modern project, it clearly presents a new system of organization (arrangement) and composition (proportion); the emergence of another way of understanding the modern legacy.

5. The verticalscape introduces a new public dimension. Whereas the modern high-rise was a markedly private investment in the three-fold sense of use, development and business, largely conceived as a formal singularity and a landmark against a backdrop of a traditional city skyline, the verticalscape belongs to the global context of the vertical metropolises of the 21st century, acting on two fronts at once: activating the continuous mass of anonymous high-rises that now constitutes the characteristic urban landscape and revising the horizontality of the public programs in the historic city. The verticalscape absorbs monumental uses of the 19th century associated with horizontality and the central city, such as parks, museums, libraries and culture centres, and also expansive uses expelled to the outskirts by the modern city, such as industries, farms, casinos, sewage plants, cemeteries and prisons, giving them fresh impetus in a new urban medium with which they interact and that they enhance. Its spatial strategies can be seen as a revision of the methodological expertise associated with private mixed use, transferring this know-how to a scenario of agreements between public and private agents, serving to regenerate and activate the complexity of space in cities, new and consolidated.

6. The verticalscape is the result of new design techniques that bring together the operative techniques of historically distinct disciplines such as ecology, urbanism, physics and de-sign. The verticalscape catalyses design techniques, the influence of digital tools and the way software affects the design of form, a characteristic which, taken to an extreme, would contrast the “analog” conception of the modern high-rise with the “digital” approach (and its various ver¬sions) of the verticalscape, modifying strategies and objectives.

7. The verticalscape contrasts the bureaucratic efficiency of the modern high-rise (whose form, origin and function underlie the organization of work in bureaux) with the creation of an environmental synergy between humankind and nature by giving form and continuation to the concepts developed by Patrick Geddes. The verticalscape can be seen as the productive accumulation of vegetable gardens and stock or energy farms in coordination with the functions of supplying and administering the city. As opposed to the bureaucrat in the modern high-rise, the spatial protagonist of the verticalscape might be seen as a thermodynamic horticulturalist inserted into urban life, who rewrites the description of the typical user of the society to be built.

OBJECTIVE

The ultimate aim of this hypothetical framework is not so much to explain existing examples (or their possible value) as to visualize the strength and applicability of this phenomenon by means of its apparent chaos. Or, rather, the way in which the study of its modern filiations and taxonomic organization allows us to correctly address a new proto-typological field that is seeing the crystallization of a series of ideas and technologies now emerging in our world, which has not yet been adequately problematized—that is, as the gestation of a new proto-typological strategy based on an up-to-the-moment technological conception and on the emerging values of society in the contemporary city. In this respect, this research makes no secret of its ambition of constructing a solid body of knowledge of what the old disciplines involved in city construction seek to be, by observing the difficulties they have trying to produce something that is coherent and sound.

By organizing knowledge into a seven-point system of differences to the modern high-rise, study and design can be organized as the successive revision/accumulation of interventions centring on a single, constantly mutating model that is both required on various fronts and activated by different fields of knowledge/design techniques.

Iñaki Ábalos.
Member of the BIArch Board of Directors, Kenzo Tange Professor at Harvard University, Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Principal of Ábalos+Sentkiewicz Arquitectos

Iñaki Ábalos is Head of the Architectural Design Department at the BIArch and will direct the second semester MBIArch Core Studio. Students will work on the concept of the verticalscape as an emergent hybrid proto-typology that combines architecture, landscape and environment, including the socio-political aspects of a milieu that is increasingly demanding in terms of energy and materials.

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