Description

First and foremost, ‘superblock configurations’ involve purposeful appropriation of broader territories than is the norm in an urban area for a single enterprise, or involve development on large single land parcels as mega-plots. They are relatively common in parts of East Asia in the post-Second World War period and somewhat earlier in the former Soviet Union, although not unknown in the hands of some institutions in the Western world.
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More specifically, superblocks have been a common arrangement for housing combined with places of employment and community services defining singular state-owned organizations, or danwei, in China together with similar situations in the former Soviet Union. But they are also manifested in earlier times, as well as in government-sponsored and privately-provided housing today in other places like South Korea, and in the context of new town developments in and around places like the Seoul Metropolitan Region. In Japan, superblocks have been more the exception than the rule for development in cities like Tokyo, although very apparent as large plots on reclaimed lands in Tokyo Bay during contemporary times in areas like Koto-ku. They are also apparent in what might be regarded as exhibition projects, such as at Fukuoka, where a superblock arrangement is used to delimit and emphasize specific projects within its boundaries.

Superblocks range in scale usually from something at or above 200 meters by 200 meters in surface area and usually the equivalent of multiple expression of smaller existing block structures, if they exist. New York University, for instance, a well-established institution, embraces several superblock arrangements within New York City, effectively aggregating several of the smaller blocks from the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan for the city. However, this is not always a modern condition, extending to the large blocks of, say, Berlin, and the höfe and mietshäuser to be found there, where the large blocks were penetrated by accessible courts and pedestrian, as well as limited vehicular, connections in a more or less organic manner.
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By contrast, East Asian and Soviet superblocks and mega-plots have been typically comprised of ‘slabs and towers in a park’, bordered by large thoroughfares in contrast to discontinuities introduced into a smaller block structure as in, say, New York City. Exceptions also occurred in both China and Japan with larger blocks in cities like Shanghai and Tokyo, and the assemblage of smaller areas of lilong and roji lane environments bounded on the outside by shophouses or similar commercial establishments.
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In fact, in certain respects, particularly with reference to entry and egress, as well as distinct outer edges and more informal interior arrangements of building and open space, these Eastern dwelling circumstances are similar to those in Berlin and other old parts of Europe.

Precedents: from Mass Housing to a New Urban Lifestyle

From the middle to late 1930s and into the 1940s housing authorities and private developers in the United States began to address the need for mass housing, especially in places like New York City where demand was rapidly rising. Superblock developments entailing the aggregation of existing urban blocks into much larger parcels became favored sites, along with a prevalence of ‘slab and tower in the park’ configurations of buildings and landscapes where an economy of scale provided a ready answer to the efficiency of mass housing production. These configurations could also provide well-landscaped settings with associated health and welfare benefits, or so it was claimed. Furthermore, the broad singular housing domains could be easily made relatively safe for pedestrian movement and leisure, as well as outside intrusions. A conspicuous example began in 1943 with Stuyvesant Town on New York City’s Lower East Side, although not completed until 1949 because of delaying controversy over its scale, alleged monotony and racist exclusivity in its originally intended use for white middle-class families. The project was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company through legislation allowing insurance companies at the time to make direct investments in moderate-rate rental housing.
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It involved demolition of an 18-block area on the order of 630 meters by 400 meters and was comprised of 35 thirteen-storey brick buildings with a site coverage of only 23 percent, leaving ample space for verdant landscape amid the panopticon-like site organization and its central oval-shaped park space. Designed by a team of architects under Gilmore D. Clark, lower commercial buildings and parking structures partially enclosed and secured the project’s street edges, with any vehicular access limited to eight entry points. Stuyvesant Town, along with neighboring Peter Cooper Village, appealed to numerous tenants well into the contemporary era.
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Public housing along similar lines was also constructed, including Brownsville Houses in Brooklyn of 1949, set at 45 degrees to the existing gridiron around Blarke Avenue, and Farragut Houses of 1952, also in Brooklyn and the last project in New York City to use radiating asterisk plan forms for its towers. Although not necessarily in New York City, many of the ‘tower in the park’ projects of this era and especially in public housing fell into disfavor and were torn down, perhaps most famously at Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.

At much the same time, if a little later on, superblock and mega-plot configurations became commonplace, as alluded to earlier, in the spatial configuration of China’s danwei, or work units. Again, it was an economic and efficient way of meeting needs in the case for housing along with specific places of employment and provision of a wide array of community services on a single site. It was also a place where there could be high conformance between the physical embodiment of a new socialist model and its community organization and production. Depending upon their value in China’s new hierarchy of industrialization, which generally favored heavier industry in what was termed ‘the primary production of the means of production’, danwei varied in size and in the quality and range of spatial provisions. The Changchun No. 1 Automobile Company that began in the early 1950s, for instance, was large, being comprised of around 20 mega-plots on an otherwise un-urbanized site of around 400 meters by 270 meters each, surrounded by wide tree-lined thoroughfares.
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Within these plots, neighborhoods were constructed modeled after the Soviet kvartal as perimeter-block schemes, with schools, kindergartens, and other social services at the center, ringed by rows of three- to five-storey walk-up apartments. Overall, the architecture mirrored the prevailing doctrine of ‘socialist content and Chinese form’, incorporating traditional-looking upturned roofs and corner towers in a monumental manner. Provision of larger work-unit facilities like gymnasia and clinics was also involved in an opulent social-realist style of building.

Elsewhere in China, superblock and mega-plot residential districts were also constructed, often averaging 400 meters by 400 meters or more each in size. Although not a danwei in the sense of being associated with a particular production unit, Caoyang in the Putuo District of Shanghai, for example, housed and otherwise provided for urban workers from its site on the then western outskirts of the city.
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Begun in 1951 and completed as late as 1984, Caoyang was made of 32,000 dwelling units with an eventual population of 107,200 inhabitants, as well as a full complement of community services and non-residential uses including department stores, a hospital, cultural centers, and a post office. It was truly a town within the city. Indeed, it was this degree of self-containment, higher even than in Soviet applications of similar models, that lent a coarse-grained and cellular distribution of communities to Chinese cities at the time, in relative isolation from one another. Even if certainly not unprecedented, given for instance the bannermen compounds fenced off within the walls of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing or the corporate compounds later on in Shanghai of the 1930s, the relative lack of accessible proximity to other parts of the city and the sheer scale of many of the communist residential districts and work units was certainly different in degree, if not in kind. On its 180-hectare site, Caoyang was phased in nine substantial subdistricts, each conformed to its topography, often involving the use of canals and a small river as armatures of a well-landscaped environment. Designed by the Shanghai Institute of Architects and in particular early on by Wang Dingzeng, who returned from studying abroad in the United States, the initial housing was provided in the form of two- and three-storey slab units with pitched roofs, radiating out into the landscape from more central facilities, in a manner reminiscent of Greenbelt, Maryland, built earlier in 1935 on U.S. federal land. Many of the early apartments at Caoyang were self-contained with regard to bathroom and cooking facilities, unusual in comparison to the ‘sleep-type’ units that predominated elsewhere in China. Subsequent housing took different forms and became denser as the years went by, including high-rise towers. Certainly during the life of this project in the late 1950s, a debate broke out over the use of perimeter block arrangements within the superblocks in China or use of uniform arrays of slab blocks arranged in parallel rows facing north-south. Finally, this issue was resolved in favor of the parallel block schemes for reasons of solar efficiency and lessening of disturbance to residents from outside thoroughfares, amid an increasing need for frugality in building as China’s economic fortunes faded. As a consequence, ‘function, form, and appearance only when circumstances allow’, replaced the earlier more opulent ‘Socialist content and Chinese form’ in architecture.

Many of the characteristics of these earlier projects like Caoyang have been perpetuated into the contemporary era in China, especially in outlying areas of cities. Sanlinyuan in the Pudong New District of Shanghai, for instance, was constructed mainly to re-settle people from the deconcentration of inner-city areas often subject of appalling overcrowding.
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Developed between 1994 and 1995 by the Kaicheng Comprehensive Development, a subsidiary of the Municipal Construction Committee of Shanghai, Sanlinyuan occupies an 11.92-hectare single site of around 350 meters by 350 meters located, at the time, in the countryside. Framed on the outside by wide arterial roads, it is part of a regularized pattern of urban development intended for much of the Pudong New District. Internally, Sanlinyuan consists of six mid-rise housing clusters of seven-storey slab blocks, with elevator service and maisonette units on the top floors. Rows of units, roughly in a fishbone manner in plan, evoke some aspects of the lilong housing in Shanghai of the 1920s, and the mansard roofs, colored brickwork, and rich façade articulation also reflects old Shanghai and its haipai style. Community open space is located at the center of the scheme, together with a recreation center, meeting hall, kindergarten, and nursery. A 25-class primary school is also located inside the site on the north-eastern corner of the complex, minimizing disturbance of the residential environment, and a row of high-rise offices lines the northern edge of the mega-plot. The average size of dwelling units is 86 square meters, a step up from living conditions inside much of the city and some 2,092 dwelling units provide for a population of from 6,000 to 7,000 inhabitants and at a fairly high density of 590 people per hectare. Overall, the project was enabled by the successful ‘three thirds’ method of financing used during the early stages of China’s efforts to monetize housing, with contributions from the state, a work unit, and individuals in more or less equal amounts.

Social programs of housing provision using superblocks and mega-plots were also developed and perpetuated in South Korea, beginning essentially in Seoul with the MAPO project by the Korean National Housing Corporation in 1962. From the outset of General Chung-Hee Park’s aggressive program of modernization from the depths of economic depression in the wake of the Civil War and subsequent slow recovery, a dramatic change in housing was initiated towards high-rise modern apartment living on superblock sites. In fact, MAPO consisted of six-storey apartment blocks on an otherwise single open site created from the demolition of earlier substandard dwellings and housing up to 642 families.
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With relatively small units ranging from 30 to 50 square meters, each apartment began to promote modern living with flushing toilets, kitchen facilities, and efficient layouts. As Seoul expanded very rapidly and crossed the Han River in the south, the new well-known Gangnam District began development in 1976 astride mega-plots of up to 850 meters by 700 meters bordered by major roads and again emphasizing construction efficiency. During the short span of some 12 years, the area became more or less fully developed in this manner, mainly by residential development spurred on by the 1972 Provisional Law on the Development of Special Regions.
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Parallel rows of tower blocks ranging in height from 18 to 23 storeys were spread in the fashion of ‘towers in a park’ as the first application of this law in Gangnam.

Moving ahead to a further response to a housing shortage in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, a program of new towns at some distance from the city proper was initiated during the late 1980s. Among these, Bundang rose as a well-appointed middle-income area linked back to central Seoul by subway and surrounded by and accessible to a verdant mountainous environment.
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Housing was provided primarily on mega-plots of 550 meters by 350 meters, bordered yet again by major roads, and penetrated by well-landscaped pedestrian streets and pathways. Developed by the Korean Land Corporation, Bundang houses in excess of 40,000 inhabitants, primarily in high-rise apartment buildings within its mega-plots. The architecture of these buildings, although not as reduced in expression as earlier less well-endowed environments, is still relatively basic, functional, and sober-looking. The adjacent presence of community streets and vital non-residential areas, however, does allow residents to embrace a reasonably commodious and well-appointed urban lifestyle.
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In Japan, not renowned for superblock or mega-plot developments outside of the Shogunal era and, indeed, comprised of urban areas, like inner-city Tokyo, with relatively small property parcels, changes ensued in response to the bursting of the speculative real estate bubble during the early 1990s. The Nexus World Housing Project in Fukuoka, a city in southern Japan, was one example, developed by Fukuoka Jisho and planned by Arata Isozaki, to introduce a new urban lifestyle to Japan.
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Developed on a sizeable single superblock, bounded by major roadways, measuring 285 meters by 260 meters, the project featured what can be called ‘demonstration projects’ by one Japanese architect, in addition to Isozaki himself, and five non-Japanese architects primarily in the form of free-standing buildings on the block’s perimeter. Among these, the project by OMA presented probably the most potentially tractable and interesting scheme for moving away from simply a perimeter building complex and into one that might be expected to cover substantial areas of a superblock condition. What OMA produced in 1997 was modest, at 24 dwelling units, each three storeys in height, but in the overall form of a mat building with light courts and direct access back into the site from the perimeter roadway. Interior and south-facing glass façades optimized solar insulation and a lower-level concourse led to individual front doors for each unit, beyond which was placed a patio. A continuous stairway led to individual rooms on the second floor and to living quarters on the third floor. The angled roofline also resonates with the mountainous profile bordering the Fukuoka Basin.

Then, on Tokyo’s waterfront at Koto-ku, also as alluded to earlier, large-block development was enabled, around 2000, through extensive areas of reclaimed land. In large part, this became the site of high-density, rental housing schemes, one of which, known as Shinonome Canal Court, was developed by an urban development corporation – CODAN – and designed primarily by Riken Yamamoto, with some participation by Toyo Ito and Kengo Kuma.
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A first phase of 420 dwelling units out of an eventual 2,000 units was completed in 2003, covering a site area of over one hectare. Composition of buildings and landscape involved a double-decked ground plane with parking beneath and penetration by light courts in the manner of a ‘field operation’. This thickened ground plane also included a curving pedestrian street among the bases of buildings distributed within the block, lined on both sides by stores, cafés, and community services. Located adjacent to a large shopping mall and accessible to Tokyo’s subway, the project also proved popular with younger families looking for moderately expensive places to live in contemporary circumstances.

Contemporary Cases: Chinese Superblocks in Beijing

A city replete with superblocks that stand as physical legacies of gated neighborhoods from its imperial past and socialist work unit configurations from the last half of the twentieth century as alluded to earlier, Beijing has seen attempts to offer alternative approaches to the design of these mixed-use, urban-architectural typologies since the early 2000s. The emergence of these new spatial operations not only sought to break up the large block into smaller, more tractable plots, thereby improving the traffic circulation, but also to provide open communities with some degree of building variation as opposed to the enclosed, and somewhat repetitive, precincts that have defined much of the urban fabric in China’s cities. In Beijing, this move has coincided with the rising affluence of urban dwellers, concomitant responses by real estate developers to cater to changing lifestyles and the growing desire for quality and differentiated housing products, as well as efforts by the local government to redevelop particular districts and consequently commission master plans to address the unwieldy superblock configurations of the past. Two projects of note representing distinct approaches dealing with superblocks are Jian Wai SOHO, the first phase of which was completed in 2004, and the Linked Hybrid, completed later in 2009.
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Located in the Chaoyang and Dongcheng districts of Beijing, they were developed by a younger generation of savvy entrepreneurs with an emphatic commitment to design, and in particular, to the significance of well-designed properties in offering compelling urban living environments for the New China.

This premium placed on design is evinced by the strategy adopted by Jian Wai SOHO, which thrives on the development of pure prime office space in collaboration with internationally-renowned architects. Established only in 1995 by the husband-and-wife team of Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the company, which stands for Small Office Home Office – has carved out a niche for itself, catering to urban professionals and the affluent through the delivery of high-quality, innovative products that fulfill the needs of this demographic type. The Jian Wai SOHO project is one of more than a dozen that SOHO China has developed in Beijing alone, and is situated at the junction of the Third Ring Road and the Tonghui River in the Beijing Central Business District. Nested in what was originally a 34-hectare superblock of old factories, the project itself was built out in seven phases, of which Phases I, II, III, and VI were completed in 2004, and Phases IV, V, and VII were finished later in 2007. The contiguous superblock was subdivided into nine smaller parcels in its redevelopment, in keeping with some of the principles put forward by Johnson Fain in their 2001 urban design and master plan for what was then slated to be Beijing’s new CBD east of Tiananmen Square. In doing so, arterial roads and secondary streets were reintroduced into the superblock, together with the CBD park occupying one of the parcels along the river front. Within this expansive site, the entire Jian Wai SOHO development took up just 16.9 hectares spread across four and a half parcels.
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As compared to the original block dimension of some 850 meters by 470 meters, the segmented parcels were much more amenable, and in the case of the two parcels comprising the first phase of Jian Wai SOHO completed in 2004, the dimension was on the order of 290 meters by 220 meters.

After an international design competition, Riken Yamamoto was engaged by SOHO China to design the master plan and the 20 apartment towers, together with Field Shop, while the four mid-rise office structures interspersed among the grid of nine towers, also known as “villas”, were designed by C + A at Yamamoto’s invitation. Jian Wai SOHO was Yamamoto’s first venture in China, and he envisioned the mixed-use project combining collective housing and commercial facilities to be an open place with alleys running in between buildings and corridors bridging housing overhead, thereby offering moments of discovery and surprise within a multi-layered, maze-like condition. Drawing allegedly on the Moroccan city of Ceuta, Yamamoto imbues the site with similar spatial features, masterfully creating a constant change of scenery, where what seemed like an underground passage suddenly lays bare to the weather elements, or where an intimate alleyway opens up to a plaza and nexus of activity at the turn of a corner. Rather than working with an ultimate image in mind, he conceived of the elements of this urban microcosm as cells that are multiplied and interconnected both horizontally and vertically, giving rise to the eventual structure of activities that have the inherent flexibility to adapt to the varying temporalities and subsequent evolution of the place.
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While the project bears a resemblance to the Shinonome Canal Court project in Tokyo by Yamamoto, mentioned earlier and that served as a precursor to this development, here, the exploration of what might be termed a ‘field operation’ was pushed much further. In this first phase, the checkerboard layout of the nine slender towers and the four “villas” was offset by 25 degrees, maximizing the solar insulation on the site as well as providing views to the Tonghui River. Against this vertical ‘forest’ of small offices/home offices and commercial space with circulation access connecting the plinth of underground parking and common living spaces right through to the rooftop gardens, Yamamoto introduced a horizontal ground plane above the plinth and its lower-level arcade structures. This ground plane is articulated by the sinuous alleys criss-crossing the site along with landscape elements arranged in bands and gardens parallel to the 25-degree building displacement. It is also at this level where the pedestrianized public space is activated through the over 200 shops, restaurants, and cafés dispersed across the project, each with its own individual entrance. Finally, the three-dimensional character of the ‘field operation’ is enhanced by the array of sunken courtyards placed strategically within the interior, traversed by bridges on the ground plane above. These not only bring daylight to the lower levels in the plinth, but also serve as open spaces, some of which are used as recreational grounds. Collectively, these seemingly simple yet sophisticated maneuvers playing on perceptual depth and unfolding visual sequences endow a high degree of liveliness to the project, while heightening the overall spatial appreciation.

Intended to be priced for middle-income earners, the complex is popular as a trendy, desirable property and its prime location caused a rapid appreciation. The concrete and partially steel-framed square towers rising 100 meters in height are 27.3 meters wide, and are categorized into the L or ‘pinwheel’ type, the MS or ‘grid’ type, and the MSC type.
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These three tower types contain a variety of unit layouts, with the L-type offering two different three-bedroom configurations, the MS-type housing one type of one-bedroom units and another three different types of two-bedroom units, and finally, the MSC-type containing a single configuration for the one-bedroom units and the maisonettes, along with two different two-bedroom unit types. The unit sizes range from 61.4 square meters for the smallest one-bedroom type up to 223.2 square meters for the largest three-bedroom unit type. Depth-wise, the units are as slim as 5.8 meters, reaching up to a maximum of only 11.7 meters, of which units with the latter depth are arranged in a pinwheel fashion along the corners of the L-type tower, ensuring that each unit has two adjacent façades allowing adequate light into the interiors. Each unit in essence becomes a work-live environment, and coupled with the proximity to other commercial and office space, less than a third of these SOHO units are in fact inhabited as residential spaces.

In contrast to this diversity of dwelling units, the two office wings in the first phase of the project are more straightforward in their floor plans, with each floor containing six office units based on three configurations, ranging from 279 to 329 square meters. Overall, the project has a total built area of around 700,000 square meters. Architecturally, Yamamoto endeavored to “avoid exclusionary and monumental” forms, thereby adopting an abstract expression of white columns and beams, juxtaposed against a fenestration of transparent and opaque glass panels, overlooking the ground level commercial facilities and sunken plazas where the urban action occurs. Jian Wai SOHO’s success is attested by the increasing number of commercial and cultural activities that have chosen to locate there, and it has likewise become a favorite venue for live performances and cultural events that draw in the crowds during the vibrant summer months. More importantly, apart from suggesting an alternative to the making of attractive mixed-use superblock neighborhoods for China, the development has been an urban-architectural innovation that has promoted a new way of living for contemporary China.

Further north of the city, right at the junction of the Second Ring Road and the Airport Expressway sits the Linked Hybrid project by Steven Holl. Located on a smaller 6.18-hectare site that was part of the former Beijing First Paper Mill, one of the largest state-owned enterprises and work units from the socialist era, this development was undertaken by Modern Land (China), another real estate enterprise based in Beijing, established only in 2000 under Zhang Lei. To distinguish itself from its competitors, it marketed its properties using the “MOMA” concept, highlighting their aim and ability to provide high-quality living environments that are at once environmentally sustainable. According to the developer, with the high-technology energy-saving features built into their products, each MOMA project would only consume a third of the energy for an equivalent residential project at the same comfort level. Prior to the Linked Hybrid, which was marketed as “Modern MOMA”, the company had undertaken similar projects where internationally acclaimed architects were commissioned to design sustainable, mixed-use residential complexes, such as “Mega Hall MOMA” and “Pop MOMA”, also in the Dongcheng District of Beijing, by Dietmar Eberle. Both of these constituted Phases I to III of the MOMA development between 2000 and 2005, located on the southern blocks of the Beijing First Paper Mill, while “Modern MOMA” was Phase IV of the development, built on the northern block of the sprawling work unit after the Airport Expressway separating the two phases was completed in 2007.

When Holl was commissioned to design “Modern MOMA” in 2002, he set out to fulfill three personal aspirations at the urban scale through an architectural project. First, he sought to leverage on a large-scale, private development to shape public space. Second, drawing on a thesis he had begun in 1986 and published as Pamphlet Architecture 11: Hybrid Buildings, he wanted to realize this notion of hybrid buildings that would provide a programmatic diversity for residents to be able to live, work, and play on site. Finally, he aimed to introduce a three-dimensional approach, and in particular the ‘Z’ dimension, in shaping the urbanity.
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The complex that resulted is composed of eight residential towers clad in Holl’s signature steel-framed, grid-like façade, as well as a series of minor blocks. In his perspective, this exoskeletal frame would not only establish the exterior envelopes, it would also circumvent any individual articulation of the towers, endowing the project and the large public space it was intended to shape with an overall cohesiveness. On the ground floor, a mix of functions primarily commercial in nature, including stores, a hotel, restaurants, school, kindergarten, and a cinematheque was intended to provide a public realm accessible to both residents and visitors alike. To open up the programs to the public, the perimeter was to be lined with shops.
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On the upper level, the complex is linked via a loop of suspension bridges intended to house a café, hotel bar, gallery, and swimming pool, constituting the so-called ‘Z’ dimension. Within this elevated passage, which Holl choreographed as a unique spatial experience, unparalleled views of the city are provided within a sequence of scenes that unfold and take on different characteristics as the light varies with the time of the day and the seasons. By introducing this bridge route, linking what would otherwise have been isolated, free-standing towers, Holl’s aim was also to create a connected “city of spaces”, and one with a “vertical horizontality”.
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With a built area of 220,000 square meters, the complex contains 750 units in both the eight residential towers and the 11-storey cylindrically-shaped hotel. The eight residential towers are composed of four basic residential floor plans, with pairs of towers sharing the same unit layouts. In total, there are 20 different unit types in the eight residential towers alone, incorporating duplexes and lofts, ranging from 66 to 159 square meters in unit area. All the apartments utilize Holl’s concept of a ‘hinged space’, first materialized in his Nexus World Fukuoka project, where folding panels incorporated into the units allowed spaces to be modified easily for use as living spaces or bedrooms, adapting to the changing life-cycle needs of a family. The rooms do not exceed 10 meters in depth, with Holl paying special attention to the sightlines and abundance of light within each unit. Environmentally sustainable features on the site include geothermal wells that reach 100 meters below ground, as well as a greywater recycling system that would allow 220,000 litres of water to be recycled on a daily basis to irrigate the gardens, roof gardens, and to offset evaporation from the central pond, producing a savings on the order of 41 percent of drinking water. These technologies were incorporated in the early stage of architectural design in collaboration with Transsolar, ensuring that these mechanical systems were well-integrated into the project to be able to attain a degree of impact on the architectural design, including the elimination of cooling towers. Within the courtyard, the central pond is traversed by bridges, some with multiple right-angled folds similar to those typically found in traditional Chinese gardens. In the middle of the pool, two inverted pyramid-shaped structures house the cinematheque. Beyond this centerpiece, the landscape continues atop, with roof gardens on the three-storey plinths that are connected to the ones above the cinematheque. Behind the building complex rise three mounds named the “Mound of Youth”, “Mound of Middle Age”, and the “Mound of Old Age”, all of which are fitted with lifestyle amenities, including tennis courts, a Tai Chi platform, coffee and tea house, a wine tasting bar, and a meditation space.

The built outcomes at Linked Hybrid, however, present a stark divergence from Holl’s original design intents. Contrary to his ambition to achieve “maximum urban porosity”, the development was eventually closed off to the public with the erection of a wall around the perimeter, reverting yet again to the conventional gated community that Holl himself had set out to avoid. Unlike the Jian Wai SOHO project, which was privately developed but located within the CBD district overseen by the local government, the degree of openness and public accessibility here was determined by the private developers. The social condenser effect through the ground plane and the ‘Z’ dimension was never fully attained, with an active public realm contained largely on the ground floor. The popularity of the Linked Hybrid as a property investment rather than dwelling units that are fully occupied also accounted for the diminished residential population, adequate only to support just one and not both realms of programs. As such, while both projects had high population densities of around 57,140 people per square kilometer for Jian Wai SOHO and 31,262 people per square kilometer for the Linked Hybrid, and represent intense use of the sites, the different management strategies have led to vastly distinct results in the actual project performance.

Dimensional Issues, Strategies, and Domain Definitions

A convergence of features from this type of housing and territory includes the dimensional qualities of broad parcels of land, usually in excess of 200 meters on a side and often around 400 meters, bounded by major roads, either as superblocks derived from an aggregation and often demolition of smaller block structures in urban areas, or as mega-plots of land in other less-urbanized situations. Mostly, this appropriation of large land parcels is for economies of scale in the delivery of housing or other construction efficiencies. The relatively self-centered territory of large blocks can also provide for the safety and welfare of residential inhabitants, as well as serving to allow location of highly accessible, non-residential functions, along with demarcation of institutional or organizational processes. One problem with superblocks and their particular and often peculiar spatial development stems from difficulty in subsequent despecialization of uses and activities during times of substantial and persistent urban change. In these and other locations, the sheer lack of fine-grained roadway networks led to substantial susceptibility for traffic congestion and considerable social costs. Then too, there is the ease with which broad areas of a city became, unfortunately, somehow gated and fenced-off from public use, particularly in circumstances where active, project-centered community use is neither extensive nor space-demanding.

In coping with both the developmental and habitable opportunities and constraints proffered by superblocks and mega-plot configurations, a number of urban-architectural strategies have emerged. First and certainly foremost during early deployment, arrangements of buildings in the modernist manner of ‘towers and/or slabs in a park’ were commonplace. Depending upon the amount of repetition, which has been very high in places like China and South Korea, this strategy can produce high densities of occupation although rather monotonous and not particularly intense environments by way of interaction with other urban activities. Second, schemes that involved discrete, publicly-accessible subdivisions within a larger block, often using regular and reasonably closely-spaced, adjacent building footprints and common open spaces, represent another strategy. Here, borders between the complex in question and surrounding urban circumstances can be blurred together with the maintenance of an overall sense of a particular subdistrict like, for example, the Rockefeller Center in New York City or China Central in Beijing’s Central Business District. A third organizational strategy involved interlinked or adjoining buildings and open courtyard spaces in the manner, say, of the Linked Hybrid in Beijing, discussed here, or the höfe of Berlin mentioned earlier. In these cases, limits in effectiveness and tractability seem to be dictated by the scale, or reach, of the architectural gestures required and the extent to which they are regarded as being somehow normal and not fantastic. Up to a point, the labyrinthine quality of the höfe can be comfortably engaged by most people, whereas technical paraphernalia of walkways among buildings may be less readily appreciated. Then too, a fourth strategy used what have been termed here as ‘field operations’, displaying highly articulated and mul­tiple levels converging as a ‘thick’, single ground plane, as well as bringing diversity, intensity, and order to a large block configuration of buildings, as at Jian Wai SOHO.

Finally, arrangement of housing on large property parcels with space in between invariably raises issues of domain definition of perceptible public space, private space, and often semi-public and semi-private space. Furthermore, the two latter dimensions, unless they are well managed, can quickly become ‘no person’s land’ or require upkeep that is incommensurate with direct use. Following on from this observation, schemes that produce clear distinctions between public and private realms at the most commonly-occupied ground level, would seem to fare best. This, in turn, places publicly-accessible block subdivisions and public courtyard schemes in advantageous positions, along with those deploying properly worked-out ‘field operations’. As shown at Jian Wai SOHO, otherwise semi-public and semi-private spaces can be pushed upwards or downwards from the common pedestrian ground plane, rendering it either fully public or fully private. The same might also be said for the Rockefeller Center, at least with regard to its sunken plaza, and for New York University with its raised gardens out of the more truly public domain.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.