Suburban Tower

Suburban Tower

This project is a reaction to the towers at Taikoo Shing. While those towers carry with them the privacy of high end urbanism, they lacked the freedom of self determination of home. Each unit is rigid, unyielding, isolating, but private. In translating the precedent to an LA context, instead of formal transformations, I attempted to change the ideas of home and privacy while keeping fundamental elements of tower typologies (Central Circulation, Floor Plates) in place. I created the Vertical Cul- DU-Sac. Instead of an elevator, there is a road. Instead of units, there are properties. The idea was to give residents of LA who might typically live in single facility detached homes the opportunity to live in an urban tower without giving up their fundamental ideas of home.

Paraphrasing Rem Koolhaas, It describes the ideal performance of the Los Angeles residential tower: a steel structure that supports six planes, all roughly the size of the original plot. Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site, as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single suburban home, or collection of detached houses. Homes on each level display a range of social aspirations from micro housing to elaborate Villas: emphatic permutations of their architectural style, footprints, typology, and so on create at each exit a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack. On level three, a woman buys a new TV in best buy and carries it home, on level 6, a man polishes his car... The structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited. It's success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies. The building becomes a stack of individual privacies.

Site Plan and Property Organization

Plans and Perspective

Models