Similar to how the church became the focal point of the medieval European city, the office high-rise with its glaring facades is now asserting itself as the prime product of urbanity in contemporary society. The high-rise building, being the ultimate carrier of the ideals of rationalization, efficiency and generic solutions, has become the embodiment of everything from the rapid expansion of multinational corporations to the abolishment of architecture’s cultural specificity. Without ornament, symbolism and craftmanship, modernist high-rise architecture marked out its own fate in the public eye as subvertor of the historic city.
Despite the proliferation of tall buildings in current times, architectural practice in Western Europe is curiously obsessed with imprinting whatever form of historical resemblance in its products to justify their existence. This results in an ambiguous dynamic in which high-rises – inherently alien and a seemingly contradictory to the urban fabric of historical cities – are embellished with futile gestures to suggest a connection with the past. Therefore, those aiming beyond the use of superficial expressions of historical consciousness must draw from their capacity to reinterpret existing cultural traditions through other creative lines of thought.
History as a resource
The city is not merely a collection of spaces but also of lived experiences. Architecture has the capacity to reflect zeitgeist: buildings become tangible relics of societies and their ideologies. As such, urban planning is the result of managing these ideologies. More than ever before, present-day densification challenges compel us to face dilemmas in a balancing act between modern needs and historical continuity. Architects and urban planners find that during their work in historical contexts, they are requested to compete with the past and must choose to either contradict or resuscitate it. The former of both efforts often coincides with a stylistic rupture, reverting to a generic appearance that contributes to a collective amnesia of history and culture. The latter – with a lack of ideology of one’s own – testifies to the insecurity of architecture about its own foundations. To quote Nietzsche: “knowledge of the past has at all times been desired only in the service of the future and the present”. Resemblance to historic architecture or the replication of identity is therefore not a goal in itself.
“knowledge of the past has at all times been desired only in the service of the future and the present”
In The Generic City, Rem Koolhaas explores what happens when cities frenetically cling to a fixed identity. Following the conceptualisation of the city as a tapestry of different ideologies, we can argue that the fixation of the traditional city on concentric expansion eventually leads to a break. As cities expand based on historic identity alone, it eventually strains this identity until it starts to lose its gravitational pull and sheds peripheral areas into exile, where it neither coheres with the historic identity, nor has the ability to produce an urban condition that is able to create a competing identity. This holds especially true when these peripheral areas are erected according to the principles of modernism – deliberately stripped of anything urban – as satellites with a heavy reliance on its “host” for culture, amenities and above all, identity.
Returning to the complex relationship between tall buildings and the historic city, we cannot afford to let our imagination and ideological thinking succumb to anxiety about the legitimacy of the architectural profession. Urban densification in these contexts must be approached with a sensitivity to the city’s historical narrative, yet without treating it as a static relic that is in danger of being lost. Urban densification, being a distinctive challenge of our time, deserves to be approached with confidence and determination; reminding ourselves that the city is a living organism and new constructions become part of the same history that we protect – thereby adding new layers of meaning to the city’s evolving story. This requires a belief that the contemporary is capable of contributing to the identity of the city.
The city and the high-rise project
This line of thinking resonates with the work of architectural historian Anthony Vidler, who promotes the thought that the architect should not refrain from shaping urban life on a large scale, calling for an urbanistic approach to architectural design. Architecture finds its validity in engaging with the urban demands and challenges of the present and not in mythicizing the past. Vidler states:
“The heroes of this new typology are therefore to be found not among the nostalgic, anti-city utopians of the nineteenth century nor among the critics of industrial and technical progress of the twentieth, but rather among those who, as the professional servants of urban life, direct their design skills to solving the questions of avenue, arcade, street and square, park and house, institution and equipment in a continuous typology of elements -that together coheres with past fabric and present intervention to make one comprehensible experience of the city.”
The challenge of integrating high-rise into the historical city is therefore not merely a matter of overcoming the adverse effects of a stylistic juxtaposition. The high-rise stigma does not just stem from its prevailing dull and generic appearance, but more from its careless integration into the city and its non-referential character. The space in between buildings is often treated as a void, an afterthought not worthy of being designed with the same attention as the building. This is partly due to the characteristics of the typology itself. Verticality tends to create ‘schism’, as Koolhaas puts it; when different functions and programs are stacked on top of each other in contained spaces, it leads to the fragmentation of urban life, since people live, work, and interact on different floors but have to do without the traditional street-level dynamism. Simply put, the amount of program with a direct interface to public space is lower.
Overcoming the vertical schism of tall buildings means that a profound relationship must be established between building and city, which was not adequately addressed by the design principles of modernism. Following Vidler, value and meaning is created when architecture and urbanism exist in dialogue, and projects exist within a greater scheme that concerns the improvement of our urban condition. This assertion is not one of revolutionary proportions, but this conception requires particular emphasis when designing high-rise architecture. It is the architect’s task to establish meaningful relationships with the street, the neighbourhood and the city. Failing to do so will result in non-referential buildings, or self-referential at best. Densification becomes a two-faced challenge; both the reinvention of the high-rise typology as well as the reinterpretation of the historic city and its identity. Yet, this duality is exactly where the opportunity lies.
text credits: Bjarne van der Drift
