housing ideas competition organised by IAAC barcelona, 2009; in which we avoided green technologies but focused on experiential issues
3 Comments »
Hounaine wrote @ April 7th, 2010 at 12:20 am
Very creative concept ! l do appreciate this work.
Peter wrote @ April 7th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
I love it. Something about big fat communal tables really makes me feel happy.
We’ve been having a discussion in our office lately about that old chestnut; how towers and elevator buildings are urban isolators. I realize that its only one day in 7 that I actually see anyone from my floor at the elevator. My old Shanghai apartment connected everyone together effortlessly (maybe even lazily) . I wish the powers that decide weren’t so enamored with towers (or so un-imaginative as to think there’s no other solution).
It’s been 40 years since…was it Candilis?… produced that simple series of towers proving that low-rise and super high-rise can house people at equal density, and 20 years since Stewart Brand outlined the superiority of social performance in low-cheap buildings. We’re still wedded to our towers, however. Sometimes I think only the wrong lessons are being shared between cultures.
km wrote @ April 7th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
why do we, or rather city-planners in liaison with private developers, keep wanting to opt for highrise housing solutions? for the city-planners, it’s a silly old-fashioned image thing: more highrises = more “modern”. for developers it’s “efficiency” – ratio of saleable area over non-saleable public access areas. what may be needed, to effect real change, is a new legislation to make it compulsory for private developers to provide a certain percentage of total build-up floor area (say, 10%-15%) to be used as communal/social space. For the sake of making communities, why not?