Block/Tower: New Housing Prototypes in Midtown Manhattan

Discipline, Energy and sustainability, High Density, Politics and economics, Rafi Segal, Rafi Segal, Stan Allen, Statement, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Ecology, Global Awareness, Planetary urbanizations, Political ecology, Politics, Population ecology, Social city, Social cohesion, Social culture, Social ecosystem, Statement, Urban ecology, Urban Paradigms, Urban political ecology

Excerpt from "Block/Tower: New Housing Prototypes in Midtown Manhattan", by Rafi Segal and Stan Allen.

Block/Tower proposes a new urban typology that responds to the changing social, technological and ecological urban conditions prevalent in dense urban environments such as New York City. The project offers an alternative model for mixed-use programming, with new functions integrated within a dense built fabric. Block/Tower is a design strategy that emphasizes the ecological, social and spatial rather than the commercial and speculative approach that has guided high-rise design of the past decades. As such, instead of an infinitely repeated typical floor plate, it suggests an integration of tower and urban block and imagines an architecture of interlocking volumes, spaces and programs that extends the urban experience of the city onto the vertical dimension of the tower.