Crossing Tracks
Connect 4 Planning
New concepts for high-rise living
This is a section of a typical European street, its 4 - 6 floors, its separated by a street and ofter there is some shared amenity on the ground floor or basement including bike stores and laundries.
This is a section of the standard Australian apartment building. Usually 2 to 4 apartments around a core, sometimes there is a common gym or rooftop garden, and the ground space is reserved for commercial tenants.
This is a diagram of generic neighbourhood circulation pattens. There might be larger roads to the perimeter, smaller local roads in the centre and often a collection of laneways or pathways that cut through and where they intersect, create a small public moment in the form of a park, or small playground.
This is a diagram of the circulation pattens in the apartment building, there is a core with one or two elevators, some fire stairs, often keyed so that residents can only access the floor they live on. Off this is a narrow corridor to a series of uniform doors. If you where to compare this with its urban counterpart, it would be like building a freeway and then having northing but cul de sac lanes as exit ramps.
The theoretical solution
Christopher Alexanders essay - a city is not a tree.
Alexander describes the structural organisation of a city and the social issues associated with over simplifying and over rationalising urban planning. The critique is that for designers, the challenge of urban planning becomes much easier if we can organise everything into rational diagrams, if we can say this Is the entertainment district, this is the sports district and this is where all the shops are going to be. The consequence of this however, is that the elements of every day life become so far apart that we tend to use them less, and to get there, we rely solely on segregated vehicular transport. For engineers, this is the ideal solution, a system without friction, unfortunately without friction and interaction, we quickly loose touch with one another and our image of society and its shared challenges and triumphs narrows. So, Alexanders solution, was that a city should be designed instead as a semi-lattice. It should be configured in such a way that resources are spread out, where most elements of your daily life are a short walk or bike ride away and where you cross the paths and interact with a wide range of different people from different backgrounds each and every day.
Adaptation to high-rise typology
It’s easy to apply Alexanders critique to the model of apartment buildings in Australia today, a frictionless system designed for ultimate privacy and security. But what if we thought about this differently? What if we considered a highrise building as both a part of a boarder urban fabric but also as its own micro urban ecosystem. What if we saw the sectional diagram of a high-rise building as a game of connect 4? Where the programme was organised in section and configured in a way to force the crossing of different paths and routines?
A Sectional Concept
An exercise in circulation
If we assume that instead of a monoculture of apartment floor plates, that we provide a mixture of scales and types of actives throughout the building. Could the key structural change just be in the circulation? What if you took the elements of an urban commute and insert them to the floor plate of a high-rise?
Similarly, what if you created mini streets that match the scale of the European ones noted above and organised homes and businesses around them on each level? Here apartments are stacked to the right, shared green spaces are in the centre and neighbourhood or commercial activity on the left sits between the elevator entrance to the neighbourhood and the homes of its residents.
