a Case for Building Middle-Heavy Cities

In the past century, a global proliferation
of dense cities filled with high-rise towers has quickly become a dominate form of human habitation. Skyscrapers around the
world generally follow an efficient vertical extrusion typology, or a set-back
style popularised by the 1916 Zoning Resolution of New York, which required setbacks to reduce building bulk to stop stop large
blocky structures from preventing light and air reaching the street. These legal restrictions created a stylistic movement among architects, inspiring the stepped shapes of the Art Deco style (most famously, the Empire State Building) and is still a trendy formal exercise for high-rise construction.

More recently, plot ratio and built area restrictions by many urban development authorities limit
the amount of built floor area in proportion to the size of the site, similarly
influencing architects to adopt set-back building schemes in order to prevent urban oppression by limitless high-rise development.

This has resulted in a widespread bottom-heavy typological approach which (while
allowing light to reach the street level) reduces the amount of public
space at grade and puts pressure on ground-level infrastructure. The end result is cities filled with narrow, corridor-like urban canyons overcrowded with pedestrian and vehicular activity.

In a recent lecture by Moshe Safdie, the legendary architect and urban planner postured that as cities around the world have quickly become
urbanised in the past century, using a brand-new high-rise building typology-
we need to think of new urban typologies to go with them, rather than
continuing to build our cities in the same way as when we were building only a
few stories high (as most cities, even the largest metropolises, do today).

I propose that architects and urban planner rethink the way that we build high-rise cities, using a middle-heavy urban typology maximizing light, public space, and multi-level connections to improve the urbanity of dense metropolitan environments.

This concept has been executed in a few specific edifices such as the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, where Rem Koolhaas placed the large trading hall in an elevated, cantilevered plinth, allowing a large public space beneath and a transcendent environment for the trading hall.

In WOHA‘s PARKROYAL on Pickering, the carpark structure is elevated off the ground, which allows the building tread lightly on the ground plane and provide ample public space below. The terraced contour architectural language dynamically carves out urban spaces of all shapes and sizes for public use, and reduces the hard building edge impact at street level. Above the elevated podium, four tower blocks are vertically extruded. This stunning structure epitomises WOHA’s stratified approach for creating urban buildings, with a lower strata interacting with the city and an upper strata embracing the sky.

This approach can be similarly seen in the School of the Arts, a specialist urban school with a lower public strata filled with public performance venues and open-air community spaces, and a secure upper strata for the private classroom facilities.

This typological movement builds on the conceptual foundations laid by Le Corbusier with his five points of architecture, specifically the “Piloti” concept that buildings should be raised off the ground, allowing public space and circulation below the building.

Expanding on this concept, a middle-heavy urban typology would replace sidewalks and streets with an expansive citywide network of sheltered plazas and parks. Vehicular networks can be freed from the narrow constraints of the typical city to allow generous pedestrian friendly streets, incorporating curbside greenery, life-saving medians and buffer zones, and facilitate future expansion without compromising area for pedestrian circulation and activity-generating facilities. The “middle-heavy” architectural strata can facilitate upper level building-to-building pedestrian connectivity alleviating foot traffic from the ground plane.

As architects and urban planners, we need to consider bold macro-scale ideas to elevate our urban existence past the status quo to a new kind of city life. The simple typological shift proposed in the middle-heavy city maximises natural light, sheltered community space, and ground level infrastructure to ultimately improve the urbanity of dense metropolitan environments.