Stacking may be the basic principle of urbanity. In its simplest form, urban densification is the practice of stacking multiples of an idea of a site upwards. This is exactly what, for instance, early towers in Chicago and New York were - extrusions of the typical plan. The Vancouver podium tower type perverts the long-established practices of urban stacking by introducing the transfer slab, conceptually the strict boundary between the city itself and the stacked typical plans. By doing so, it removes the constraints of the site on the typical plan, rendering the stacked element itself arbitrary. It is possible to think of the podium tower as a logical derivative of the modern tower's historical development, inasmuch as the wonderfully compelling idea of stacking urban sites has gradually been reduced in the past century into practices of building expedience. In other words, while the podium tower employs the typical plan, it does so only for the aspects of its accepted framework which have become an economic imperative - the ease of constructing a repetitive (infra-)structural system. Perhaps there is a way of thinking about stacking as a more abstract practice of densification, speculatively divorced from the baggage of construction economy and thus freed to become whatever it needs to be.
(From competitor's text)
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- Presentation Panel
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- Plan
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- Photograph of Model
