V E R T I C A L D E N S I T Y
Is it possible to house a city in a tower?
Is the modern skyscraper a city by itself?
The city as an interior.
Undefined and unlimited territories and environments.
The city is everything.
Vertical city
01. D E S C R I P T I O N S
(Manhattan)
Visiting Manhattan as a tourist. Drawing the city in our memories; a city made up of fragments, bodies, perceptions, sounds, atmospheres… There are no streets or buildings, but the position of everything in the city belongs to the memory of each person. For once, tourists and architects agree.
Building a new psychogeographical map of the city with the city, in a new interpretation of the city. mapa psicogeográfico de la ciudad con la ciudad en una nueva interpretación de la ciudad.
We choose 7 fragments of the city that could make up a city by themselves; autonomous bodies-surfaces, horizontal landscapes, infrastructures. The unchosen city, blurs out.
C I T Y F R A G M E N T S of Manhattan:
01_5th avenue_
02_ Broadway Avenue _
03_ Piers _
04_ Financial District _
05_ Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge _
06_ Central Park _
07_ Central Park´s Perimeter _
02. M A N I P U L A T I O N S
_(working model. Generation of new surfaces)
Unfolded topological plan.
Once we have chosen these “bodies-working surfaces”, we interpret them with the help of manipulating and folding mechanisms.
These operations come across with new relations, while generating greater density, putting forward possibly engaged relations with the organization and future of the city. We can think of a new urbanism; more open, more pragmatic and user-friendly, and therefore less conventional and melancholic.
In the folding process, we find overlaps and scale transformations, which cause hybrid conditions and programmatic impurities. As a result, the diagrammatic clarity and the city turn into a tapestry of accidents, which are no longer generated by history, but by humans.
03. N A R R A T I O N S
concept of continuity
The fragments of the city, when folded, turn into loops, winders, attractors, accumulators, and occupants of the interstitial spaces, according to the needs of the city. The city is full of intersections and therefore a wide range of possibilities occurs.
The aim of this research is the creation of urban complexity in height. The vertical city is a three-dimensional network, not a building. Folding and unfolding, zig-zagging, giving the city a continuous labyrinthine quality, a depth in space that has its consequence in time.
Instead of a conventional stack of floors, each level section is manipulated to connect to the situations above and below, in the way that all planes would be connected at least by a trajectory; so that all planes would be connected by at least one trajectory; alleyways of streets would connect the vertical city.
The stack of folded surfaces would create a complex vertical landscape, where program, circulations, and structure are one.
A vertical intensified landscape…