Design Reserach Project
Page 3
Public Contribution in High-Rise Building Design
@ New York City
Public Space in High-Rise Environment
In the ancient history the high-rise tower has a function, basically in terms of Monument and Landmark for the legacy of the individuals or empire. It can be considered as the sign for orientation from the people at far-away spot (picture of the Egypt light house). Sometimes it was the icon of sacred space that needs to be treated differently from normal building such as the place for connecting to god.
Human has the idea of “scale”. The large object can dominate the smaller; such as larger person is normally stronger compared to the normal person. God who always has the power over us must live over us. People in many culture always believe that god or goddess is in the sky. And the way to contact him or her is to use the higher structure to reach them. At that time, power belonged to the people who had the army, people who can contact with the holy spirit. These people used the high-rise object to address and express their own power indeed.
Picture: Tower of Babel
Public Space: The Transformation
The public space at that time such as In the Roman Empire, Rome was the major city with very crowded population. Every major facility was put together in the same area and was connected within the walking distance. The street fa?ade was filled with many retails and stores. Many activities occurred when the people had the interaction while they were walking. It is the life that the individual was so connected to the social life. People can feel the energy that was moving around them, the market, the Coloseum, the theatre, basilica etc. It is the feeling of city with a lot of people walking on the street. Eventhough the status of the people was placed in a wide-range of hierachy from the royal to the slave, but all of them were using the same street. They may have a special vehicle for some people on some occasions which was normally the horse, or something that was used by animal power such as a cart, chariot etc. which was really harmless to human and produced no pollution.
Before the industrial revolution time, the human life was about sharing. Every individual in the society had their important role and really depended on each other. For example if some community had the project of building a church, they had to find the people who were the best in all kinds of handicraft work for each part of the church; the master of rose-window, the master of steel motif etc. If one of them quit their job or refused to work, the church cannot be finished.
After the industrial revolution, everything changed drastically. It was not the time that people had to depend on each other anymore, army and the connection with the holy spirit did not bring the power to the people as much as money. In this era, the craftsmanship of the people was eliminated and the machine took the role for everything. Most of the people in Europe where it was the origin of industrial revolution were working in the factories, doing the same thing all the time. People became one of the cogwheel in the big machine. If anything happened, the owner can fire that man and replaced him with another guy who can do the same thing right away. It was so easy to find the people who can do the easy thing like working in the factory everywhere.
Distance between the people in different status was increased by the amount of money they have got. Wealthy men can get everything they want and can do anything they want to the poorer. For their surrounded environment, the technology that they have invented made it worse. England is the very good example. In early 1900, the city became like a dark cloud all day all night. It was the core of the pollution. The rich people always tried to find the way to get out from the city to live in the big house in suburbs as long as possible and the poor had to come into the city to get a job with low payment and low quality life.
New invention such as automobiles divided the people from different class obviously when they using the same street, people who have cars are comfortable while producing the pollution to the people who’s using walkway. The space for cars slowly took the public space that the people can use for social activities. The people do not need to walk anymore. They use the hi-technology to bring them to the place they want and use it to get back home. Less social life became the character of the urban city. The city image became the place that was fast, unfriendly and unhealthy.
However, once the capitalism is still growing strong, people will still move into the city to find the better opportunity. The limit amount of area that they have and the large amount of people coming into the city make them have no way to gain the space but going up into the air.
New Beginning
Therefore the new high-rise in the new age that appeared into the big city has the different originality from the one in the history. Cause of invention is totally different, it used to be the icon for expressing the power and domination but later it was born again as a result of dense environment. It is not for individual or particular group anymore. It is the feature for public. However, the negative image of the city still never change even until now.
High-Rise is the hallmark of the 20th Century. It is the dominant building type. Its impact is affecting every facet of urban life. Its scale is affecting the very form of the urban life, and also is affecting the very form of the city.
These towers have resolved some certain aspects of the society’s needs for density and concentration, and have opened up new ways of experiencing space. However, their dominance does not mean that most designers or users of these super-scale structures, have succeeded in resolving the many environmental and urbanistic issues they pose.
--We never consider enough to use high-rise towers as an effective urban building block.
--We never consider to make them uplifting places to live or work.
--We have become dependent upon high-rise buildings, but we have also been compromised by them.
How have these elegant buildings come to shape our urban lives so dramatically ?
The Early Age
In the beginning, the height of the building is very limit. They were built only at the level that can be reached by climbing up. It may be 4 to 5-storeys. Based on the scale and size of these walk up buildings, the organization of the city’s streets and public spaces developed over centuries, and evolved in relationship to the transportation systems, building materials and technology of the times. The later-invention of Otis Elevator, Concrete Frame Structure and Bessemer Steel did not occur by chance but in direct response to the quickening pace of commerce and congestion in the nineteenth-century city. Urban buildings soon soared in height, first in Chicago and New York and quickly thereafter in cities all over the world.
Wall Street in 1890
The early tall buildings have a relatively small floor plates. Before the invention of air-conditioning system, all the areas on the floor plate must be able to accept the air from outside and the windows must be operable. They were built in the same place as the low-rise buildings. The plans are similar except the larger core of elevator banks and fire stairs.
In style, the tower was ranged from Neo Classical to Gothic. Luis Sullivan was one of the designers who tried to find the new role of the tall buildings as a composition of base, middle and top. The base often contained shops, and an effort was made to defer to the life of the street. These designers were urbanists at heart, preoccupied with the scale of buildings as they were perceived by the pedestrians, and with the manner in which each one, side by side with its neighbor, contributed to forming the continuous public space of the street.
Picture: Early High-Rise Builing of New York City
This type of building was built quickly in the city and the impact was profound. It cut of sun and light from each other and from the street. The idea emerged that zoning ordinances could help moderate the negative impact of these proliferating skyscrapers on the city as a whole. In early 1916, provoked by the sheer massiveness of the forty-two-storey equitable building, New York City passed its first zoning ordinance to prohibit towers that presented continuous wall from base to top and blocked day light entirely from the public realm below. Known as the “setback law,” the ordinance related the height of the building wall to the width of the street that it bordered, and specified different levels at which the building be ”set back” from the street as it extended upward into the air. Each neighborhood received guidelines specific to the particular character of its streets.
Picture: Model of the maximum envelop of New York high-rise building according to 1916 Law
Picture: High-Rise Building of 1930s
By the time of 1922, there was the erect of new style from the modernist coming up from the Competition of Chicago Tribune Building. The modernist united all components of the building into a simple extruded object with a thin, repetitive and less costly outer skin. This “winning” modernist ideology made a virtue of what was essentially an architecture of economic expediency.
Keeping the streets and sidewalks more open to light, sun and sky, the progressive set back had a decisive effort both outside and inside the mass of the tower. Stepping back from the street as they rose a new generation of ziggurat-like to towers took their places along New York’s streets and like sparks of energy, helped to generate a more intricated, more dynamic urban skyline. Transforming the interior spaces of towers as well, the jagged profile created a series of terraces and roof gardens – out doors spaces for both office and residential uses.
Rockefeller (1931-39) is one of the good examples in terms of relationship to the urban environment. Combining different heights of towers and lower buildings within on large city block moderated the impact of the tower at ground level and allowed for pedestrian alleys and piazzas in the block’s interior. With rows of stores and comfortable out-door public spaces these secondary pedestrian precincts became natural extensions of the major city streets, and extended the domain of the public realm into the domain of the buildings. Driven by zoning laws the skyscrapers of an era thus were shaped to preserve and enhance the urban experience at street level
Picture: Rockefeller Center
Modern
Beginning in the 1950’s the emphasis on tower design became more closely focused on perceiving the building as an independent entity in the city, rather than as a part of a street wall that shaped public spaces. Mies van der Rohe, in his early designs, and later the firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill and other firms evolved for the office buildings and entirely new role in the urban design of the city – that of a sculptural object. Using the ground plane as a kind of stage for a unique event, the tower was conceived as singular, its simple shape and indifferentiated skin cut off, seemingly arbitrarily, where it his the ground and reached the sky. Miesian vision of a minimalist extruded tower became a convenient model. Increasingly vast, windowless work areas became an accepted answer to the need for more space, with air-conditioning commonly replacing windows that open and other methods of natural ventilation. To serve greater areas, elevator cores got fatter; to accommodate more people and services, the birth of tall buildings continued to grow.
Picture: Seagram Building
In 1961, the setback law in New York City had been entirely dismantled as ever larger envelopes of space presented ever greater challenges to the traditional urban adjustment. It allowed bonus heights for the owners who provide public space areas. The same as Mies’s 1958 Seagram, the designer tried to break away from the street edge. The set back space became a large plaza. All the buildings after that had grown to take whole block for their sites, with plazas that was vast, sheer and empty. For example, 55 Water Street, the project owner proceeded the plan for public plaza on the 2nd floor of the building, about 30-feet high from the ground level, the people have to use elevator or staircase to access this space. And when they get there they see nothing but the large concrete plaza. It was attached to the highway that is noisy and there is no activity up there. The landscape design of this plaza is also very poor. The result, this plaza is completely dead. Nobody ever comes to use it. It is totally an unpleasant area, very expensive unpleasant area.

The formula for developer:

Public Space = Bonus
Picture: 55 Water Street
This phenomenon happened everywhere in New York City from the late 50s-80s, the plaza that was encouraged by public funding and bonus zoning. Disrupting the continuity and containment that had existed for the pedestrian in the historic city street, in effect, the plaza represented a total denial of the tradition of urban space. Each modern tower was exaggerated in size and scale as pedestrians stood back to see these giant buildings crashing – all fifty floors – into the ground plane.
Material Experiment
Picture: Building of Post Modern
In the early of 1980s, having dominated downtown for almost 30 years, modernist towers began to provoke wrath on the part of the public, and a second cycle of compositional invention on the part of architects. The repetitive monotony of scale, envelope, and massing, the expanses of undifferentiated walls slicing off suddenly at the sky, the mammoth and absolute presence of these towers seemed to have run their course as an urban aesthetic. Drawing upon techniques similar, in some ways to those explored in the earliest high-rise towers, designers once again, attempted to break down scale and create unique identity in the skyline. Again seeking to delineate bases, tops, and setbacks, these designers employed vaired material that, without resorting to the earlier use of costly individually crafted cut stone or cast terracotta, created walls of different kinds of glass, metal, precast concrete, and thinly cut textured and colored stone but continued to view their towers as singular object in the urban landscape.
Moving Forward
High-rise urbanism, as we have seen both in theory and in practice, was born with fundamental contradictions: unresolved tensions between viewing towers as intrinsic part of a dense downtown and treating them as self-sufficient elements in the environment. Not surprisingly, the result of this confusion is a desultory and compromised high-rise city.
The skyscrapers simply imposted on an old urban structure, on street scales and lot sizes that significantly predated buildings whose shadows extended hundreds of feet, whose impact on wind and air circulation was profound, and whose tops towered over the side walks below. Furthermore, in most of North America and in newer cities around the world, that original urban structure was an “Undifferentiated” grid, which meant that no hierarchy created by principal routes, unusual natural features, or an ordered pattern of civic buildings and spaces acted to guide the placement of towers in the city as a whole. Commercial skyscrapers thus are a major cause of current disordered events.
Recently, courthouses, museums, concert halls, performing arts centers, libraries, and institutions of governance have begun to seek financing by selling to developers their “air-rights” and buildable areas allowed by zoning. Forced to “hitch a ride” with commercial mega-structures, civic and cultural institutions must now relegate the choice of their sites to secondary importance, and their own visibility and presence in the city has, in many cases, been drastically diminished as a result.
It is obvious that life and quality of urban community is greatly affected by the configuration of tall buildings. Therefore, as a designer, we must recognize that ground from which the tower rises, and discover and invent a new urban base to receive, support, and connect the people and the buildings. And when we do, the urban tower will be vibrant with life, more than today’s cold and glinting obelisk, draped in masonary and glass, and buzzing exhaustively in monotone.