Description

The housing category of ‘big buildings’ broadly conforms to a type of extensive residential complex that is generally mid-rise or mid-to-high-rise and where dwelling units and other functions are accommodated in a single structure or a few interlocked structures. The type also broadly conforms to the idea of the ‘submultiple’ providing for integrated dwelling environments at levels below that of a district but comparable to that of a neighborhood. More pointedly, they are complexes where housing and community services are no longer seen as separate facilities or spatially-separated functions, but are contained together in a single structure. The term ‘submultiple’ was coined by Leonardo Benevolo in 1984, among others, and was usually applied to single building complexes of 1,000 plus units and at densities of around 400 to 550 people per hectare. This is roughly equivalent to the idea of a neighborhood in a single building. Spatially, submultiples were at least partially supported by models of social interaction, which stressed the priority and centrality of certain functions over others. And while the quest for an appropriate submultiple was not unique to the modern era, its importance was certainly magnified by prevailing technocratic preoccupations with control, management, and functional interdependence of the modern era. In most cases, submultiples as big buildings were built in the post-Second World War period towards and on the periphery of cities in the cause of mass-produced housing. More recently, submultiples as big buildings have continued in this vein on greenfield sites, as well as on brownfield sites slated for large-scale redevelopment.

Precedents: from
Unités
to Sprawling Complexes and Green Buildings

Although not exactly conceived of as a vertical neighborhood, the Unité d’habitation de grandeur conforme by Le Corbusier was of sufficient size and did conform within a single building all the local shops, services, and recreational opportunities for a community of some 1,200 to 1,600 people. Comparable to Fourier’s Phalanstère, with which Le Corbusier was quite familiar, the Unité was to be the basic cell of the new city. Furthermore, as a single building and plastic entity, the Unité promised to make the formation of subdistricts within a city architecturally tractable.
[1]
Le Corbusier commenced work on the Unité concept in 1944, with proposals for the Unité d’habitation de transitoires, or emerging housing, although many of the ideas embodied draw on his earlier work including the 1922 Immeubles-villas. This was also when Le Corbusier transformed this thinking from the individual house to the context of collective living. Then, in 1946, the newly created Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning in France provided an opportunity of a trial application of the Unité d’habitation de Marseille. Completed in 1952, the project drew considerable attention and others were built at Nantes in 1955, Berlin in 1957, Briey in 1961, and Firminy in 1968.
[2]
Raised off the ground en pilotis, allowing landscape to flow underneath it, the Unité at Marseilles rose to a height of 17 storeys or 56 meters and was 165 meters in length and 24 meters in width, sufficient to allow cross-ventilation into units. Fully 337 apartments were composed as double-height units juxtaposed in section and interlocked together with internal streets centrally placed within the building every three floors. A ‘street’ lined with some 26 commercial and community service spaces was placed at an intermediate level between the seventh and eighth floors. The interlocking ‘maisonette units’ also had terraces open to the outside along with brise soleil, or sunscreens, to both the east and west. The longitudinal façade was asymmetrical in composition, with one end given over to elevators and internal stairs for vertical circulation. Considerable variety was introduced into the various apartment units, with 23 distinct unit types adaptable to specific requirements of habitation. These ranged from student apartments, through dwellings for sizeable families, to hotel-type rooms. Interior moving screen walls also added to spatial flexibility. The roofscape consisted of sculptural forms housing a gymnasium, a running track, a pool, a kindergarten, an outdoor theater and vent stacks, as well as utility rooms. Several other Unités were also designed and built by others in France, including the Unité de voisinage at Bron-Parilly, by Bourdeix, Gagès, and Grimal. Later, the so-called ‘collective units’ of housing, rising as much as 15 floors at Toulouse Le Mirail, also in France, by Candilis-Josic-Woods of 1960 through 1966, share many of the hallmarks of the Unité.

[3]

At much the same time as the Unités at Marseilles and Nantes, Fernand Pouillon designed and built his version in the new town of Climat de France at Oued Koriche in Algeria, completing it just before the War of Independence between 1958 and 1962. In the form of an enclosed perimeter block with a monumental peristyle surrounding the Place Bar el Aghab, also known as the Place of the 200 Columns, the entire edifice is large, at 260 meters in length and 65 meters in width. A clear precedent was the Maydan-i Shah at Isfahan in Iran, which Pouillon visited in 1955.
[4]
Comprised of some 360 dwelling units, at around 120 per floor, on top of 200 or so shops at plaza level, the columns framed a three-storey-tall colonnade. Located laterally across a sloping hillside to the west of the Casbah in Algiers, the complex affords splendid views to the Mediterranean and is part of the larger community of 4,000 or so dwellings on a 30-hectare site, built for the City of Algiers under France’s then ZUP, or Zone à urbaniser en priorité program. In fact, Pouillon was named by the mayor of Algiers as Chief Architect for the city. Dwelling unit plans throughout were standardized and relatively large, spanning across the entire building from the interior courtyard to the exterior walls facing outside streets. With a resulting overall building thickness of some 12.5 meters, similar to the earlier ‘block shapers’, the totally paved monumental court was very ample at 235 meters by 40 meters forming a major center and day-to-day activity space for the entire community. All told, the building rises some seven storeys above the street, with the interior peristyle of rectangular columns forming the majority of the interior façades. Indeed, the peristyle fulfills its traditional role of mediation between the very public court on the outside and the private precincts on the inside of the complex. It also forms something of a street and a climatic relief from the hot Algerian sun. Finally the peristyle helps the complex pay homage to the idea of a ‘palace for the people’. Roof spaces above are gendered and appropriated by women as their spaces for laundry and other activities.

The submultiples of Rome in Italy got underway in the wake of the migratory influxes to the city during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1962 plan prepared the city for further peripheral development, incorporating the circumferential Grande Raccordo-Anulare (GRA) and the national Law 167 of the same year, and forced local administrations to expropriate land, at reasonable prices, proportional to local populations and assign it to the construction of public housing. Subsequently, Plans for Economic and Popular Housing (PEEPs) were designated within the areas zoned under Law 167 and construction commenced in 1964.
[5]
A number of urban districts, or quartieri, were produced, beginning with the Quartiere di Spinaceto of 1964 or 1965 in south-west Rome just beyond the GRA and about four kilometers from the major employment site at the EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma). Overall, the project was large, housing over 26,000 people on a 187-hectare greenfield site of rolling countryside. The plan was by Piero Moroni with Lucio Barbera and Nicola Di Cagno as architects, among others. The disposition of dwelling units took the form of linear slab buildings, ranging from four and five storeys to 10 storeys, running roughly parallel with main roads winding through the site with its topography, and containing housing, shops, and community facilities within them. Of the 8,000 or so dwelling units constructed, larger buildings accommodate upwards of 400 units.
[6]
Later, during a second version of the PEEP encouraging individual architectural experimentation, the Quartiere Laurentino 38 by Petro Barucci began construction in 1976 and was also located in the south of Rome near the EUR, although inside the GRA. Consisting of well-composed, eight-storey slab blocks and some towers running perpendicular on podia of community services and facilities, again next to a curving roadway, each submultiple contained on the order of 400 dwelling units.
[7]

Among the submultiples in the form of big buildings during this period, Corviale by Mario Fiorentino of 1972 through 1974 is among the most striking and controversial. Extending as a single building for one kilometer on a 60-hectare relatively isolated site inside the GRA, Corviale is reminiscent of the unité in sectional development, although much larger. Housing on the order of 8,500 inhabitants, Corviale featured community services and commercial facilities, along with parking, at the lower entry levels and in an intermediate space five floors up. The first five floors of dwellings were served by a double-loaded corridor, whereas those above the non-residential intermediate level were split into two separated building volumes, with an open space in between for a further four levels and a rooftop area.
[8]

The tragedy of this and some other big building schemes from the era derived, at least in large part, from poor attempts to micro-manage living environments in the face of overwhelming complexities, exacerbated when the projects became dumping grounds for the poor, indigent, and drug abusers. Later projects, like the Quartiere di Torrevecchia, completed in 1984 and housing around 3,600 people, by Pietro Barucci again, were more modest and fared better.
[9]

Remaining in Italy but moving away from Rome, probably the most notable big building submultiple was the Gallaratese on the outskirts of Milan by Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi, and Studio Ayde.

The property was owned and developed by the Monte Amiata Association, which commissioned the plan in 1967 and conveyed the finished project in 1974 to the City of Milan.
[10]
A complex of five buildings interconnected on a 6.5-hectare irregular site was construed to create a sense of community, with shops, offices, community facilities, and an amphitheater, in addition to dwellings for some 2,500 people. Most of the project was designed by Aymonino in the form of an eight-storey double-loaded slab, splayed in plan at around 120 degrees; a six-storey slab block; and a two-storey bridge block, linking the other slabs, with a raised piazza and amphitheater. Housing five basic kinds of dwelling units, from studios to larger duplexes, the architecture of the slab blocks was strongly animated by elevator shafts, stairways, and a complex building section of interlocking units, with courtyard units at the base as well as maisonettes on top. Allegedly, Aymonino was influenced in the repetitive cellular arrangement of the stepped section by Trajan’s Market in Rome. Rossi’s ‘galleria’ building, rising four storeys, was accessed via a two- and three-storey public arcade at the base, running the full length of the complex. Here, the reference was apparently to the ballatoio of Milan from the 1920s as well as to rationalist architecture from much of the same period. The crisp geometry of the housing block, together with the monumental arcade, was also reminiscent of Pouillon’s earlier work at Climat de France. Apparently, the number of visitors to the project swelled in the 1970s to a point where an entry fee into the complex was charged.

Elsewhere entirely, big buildings were also constructed, including the Fusuijing Commune in Beijing of the 1950s, Edificio Copan in São Paulo, Brazil, by Oscar Niemeyer of 1951, and Sewoon Sangga in central Seoul of 1967 by Soo-Guen Kim.

Moving into the contemporary era, in addition to the three cases defined in more detail in the next section of this chapter, other projects come to mind, including Via Verde in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City. This was a product of a competition organized in 2006 by Shaun Donovan, now the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and then the Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
[11]
The aim was to combine green building concepts with good architecture for public housing and to produce an exemplary project in an area of the Bronx that had been ravaged by blight, neglect, and physical desolation. The vacant site located at 156
^th
Street and Brook Avenue was long and tapered, formerly occupied by mid-rise buildings that had since been torn down. The competition was won by a consortium of Grimshaw Architects from the United Kingdom, Dattner Architects as a local firm, and Lee Weintraub, a local landscape architect. The developers for the project arose from a partnership between Phipps Housing and the Jonathan Rose company, both long in the business as affordable housing providers, with the Phipps family’s involvement dating back to at least 1905.
[12]
Completed in 2012, Via Verde consists of a single, stepped building complex that rises from three- to four-storey townhouses at one end, through mid-rise duplex units up to a 20-storey tower. The whole complex also encloses a ground level open-air court and an abundance of green roofs forming a cascading garden landscape and range of community gardens that also provide for a promenade for residents up and over the building components. The 220 dwelling units of various types are broadly divided among lower-income rental units, accounting for roughly 60 percent, and middle-income owner units in a cooperative arrangement. A fitness center is prominently located on the top of the building, which also includes a health and wellness center in a ground floor retail-like space, as well as some other community facilities. Indeed, the production of fresh produce in the community garden venture; the mix of public and private open space to encourage residents to spend time outside in the fresh air, including the garden terraces; and the massing of the building to allow for plenty of natural light; all aim to produce an affordable, green, and healthy building environment.
[13]
So also do the myriad of roof-mounted solar panels, the prolific amount of material recycling both during and after construction, and the prefabricated façade treatment for efficient and cost-saving construction.

Contemporary Cases: Big Buildings in Urban Circumstances

Much like the tall tower typology that is used to provide a larger number of units, big buildings and submultiples also serve the same ends, although without the same site limitations but with a clear intent to incorporate other amenities and programs within a singular structure. The period of the 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century saw a resurgence of this particular typology, including three remarkable projects completed in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The two Dutch examples of interest are the Piraeus block and The Whale, designed by Hans Kollhoff and Christian Rapp, and de Architekten Cie respectively. Located in the Eastern Harbor District (Oostelijk Havengebied) of Amsterdam, the two projects are also representative of how former infrastructural sites, and in this case commercial docklands, could be transformed into new uses. Before Rotterdam emerged as the largest Dutch shipping port in 1962, Amsterdam’s development was in fact shaped profoundly by its harbors. The docklands in the Eastern Harbor were the first deep-water harbor in the city, and were created as landfill islands during Amsterdam’s ‘Second Golden Age’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The advent of railroads and steamships necessitated docks of much longer lengths to allow goods to be efficiently transferred to and from the sea-faring vessels.
[14]
By 1915, the entire Eastern Harbor District was fully developed and equipped with all the infrastructural support, comprising six major sections including KNSM-eiland, Sporenburg, Borneo-eiland, Java-eiland, Oostelijke Handelskade, and Rietlanden. Of these, the Piraeus block and The Whale were developed on the KNSM-eiland and Sporenburg island respectively.

After the Second World War, the Eastern Harbor District began to lose its competitiveness, so the city authorities decided to acquire the district and revealed in their 1978–1982 program that the islands would be redeveloped as a residential area. This initiative was further fleshed out in the Policy Document on Basic Principles on the Amsterdam Eastern Harbor District issued by the City Council in 1985, which coincided with a period of depopulation from the city center and an intense demand for housing. Subsequent urban renewal efforts focused on housing, due in large part to the considerable involvement of the Steering Group for Supplementary Housing.
[15]
After several iterations, a second policy document was issued and adopted in 1990. Specifically, the basic principles called for the island structure to be the foundation for metropolitan housing and employment, with further specifications demanding the incorporation of parking within the apartment buildings, construction of as many dwelling units as possible that have a clear division between a ‘busy’ or public side as opposed to a ‘quiet’ or private side, variation in building heights with most to range between 15 and 25 meters and some high-rise exceptions of up to 60 or even 100 meters, and the recasting of water as a ‘recreational element’ with the housing. More notably, Amsterdam signed an agreement with the Dutch government where the city would receive 79.6 million Dutch guilders if it managed to construct 5,767 units before 1995, or the equivalent of 100 dwelling units per hectare, half of which was to be market-rate non-subsidized or lightly-subsidized housing as opposed to the conventional social housing provision.
[16]

The KNSM-eiland was the first of the docklands in the district to be redeveloped. Two structural layouts were proposed: the first was by Arne van Herk and Sabine de Kleijn where building strips in an open parcel were to be positioned in relation to the dock; the second was by the Spatial Planning Department (DRO) which promulgated for large, enclosed residential buildings of six to eight storeys in height, opening to views of the water on one side, and to an avenue, plaza, or courtyard on the other.
[17]
With the City Council in favor of the DRO’s proposal, Jo Coenen was commissioned by the Eastern Harbor District project group to elaborate on the structural sketch and to design the master plan in 1989. Drawing upon the monumental character of the KNSM dockland, Coenen bisected the long dockland with a central avenue, the KNSM-laan. Large residential buildings alongside old harbor facilities were located on either side of this axis which terminates on Coenen’s own project, the circular residential ‘Emerald Empire’.
[18]

Coenen’s master plan had prescribed the two monumental buildings to be composed of large perimeter blocks with circular courtyards, complete with commercial space, shops, and restaurants along their ground levels. In the case of what was later renamed the Piraeus block, there was also a stipulation by the city to preserve the old KNSM administration building located right at the center of the southern façade. Rather than translating Coenen’s vision directly into built form, Kollhoff and Rapp took his plan as a starting point, transforming the monolithic volume submultiples measuring 170 meters long by 60 meters wide into what later became one of the most outstanding and influential buildings in the Eastern Harbor District. Kollhoff and Rapp first did away with the circular courtyard, moulding the limbs instead into folded wings wrapped around the conservation landmark before enjoining the northern length of the block. In making these folds, asymmetrical wedges were cut out from the block, especially along the eastern half of the volume, thereby offering some visual relief from what would have been a monotonous front along the southern edge, while also serving as a spatial funnel guiding pedestrians through a passageway connecting this new block back to KNSM-laan. To preserve the links to the former dockland park to the west, the architects opened up the western edge of the block on the first five storeys, allowing the remaining floors of housing above to float on an arcade of slender columns, thereby maintaining the visual and physical continuity between the park and the open garden within this western half of the volume. Finally, to maximize views on this water­front site, the architects played with the overall elevations, retaining the maximum height on the northern edge while reducing the height gradually along the western and eastern edges of the block to approximately six storeys on the southern elevation, before dropping down eventually to four storeys at the tail end of the wings tucked back under the opening on the northern edge. In addition, the roofs of the sculptural block were sloped downwards back into the block punctuated by skylights, so as to let sunlight from the south into the courtyard and the units on the top floors, apart from opening up views to the waterfront for the residents in the northern edge.

Constructed primarily with bricks in keeping with the materiality of the small, historic building it wraps around, the massive building is topped with an uninterrupted aluminum roof that further accentuates the coherence of the mega-form but also acts as a reflective surface increasing the diffusion of light within the courtyards. Apart from harkening back to the expressionism embodied by the Amsterdam School of Architecture with their playful use of bricks to create an integrated architectural sculpture, the choice of brick further underscores Kollhoff’s belief that “the architecture of the city center needs to look solid”.
[19]
Much as the Piraeus block appears imposing, the introduction of the open courtyard connected to the park on the west, the central passageway, as well as the enclosed courtyard on the east effectively break the scale of the large block, generating instead more intimate spaces within. Further, the dark brick façade is broken up by a rhythmic pattern of light-colored wooden entryways at the street level, constituting the internal system of point-loading that provides access to two apartments per floor. From the fifth storey and above, the building envelope manifests yet another kind of circulation logic within the building: here, access is made possible by elevators that are connected to corridors which are either projected in glazed volumes from the façade, or contained within recessed galleries.

The overall coherence of the Piraeus block and its classical style of straight continuous lines and regularly spaced windows that seem to suggest an internal repetition belies the fact that the building contains an impressive diversity of living units. In total, it houses more than 50 different unit types within 304 rental apartments, varying from studios to three-bedroom apartments, and between 82 to 174 square meters, with a mix of live-work and non-live-work units. The residential density too, not surprisingly, is high at 298 dwelling units per hectare. Within the assortment of unit types, there appears to be a general convergence on a basic type that is rectangular in shape, containing a centralized core of service elements flanked by a living axis and a smaller, secondary service axis, as well as a thickened boundary and a glazed winter garden along the exposed façade. The more unique layouts though arise largely from conditions where the building envelope deviates from the orthogonal, such as the unusual folds in the building, as well as where the sloping roof defines the upper limits of an apartment unit. As the first building to be constructed on KNSM-eiland and completed in 1994, the Piraeus attained a tectonic expression central to Kollhoff’s works, and stands as a timeless, civic tribute that also recalls the warehouses of its infrastructural heritage.

Situated directly across the water from the Piraeus block is yet another striking landmark in this Eastern Harbor District – The Whale. Finished in 2000, this housing complex by de Architekten Cie is part of the Borneo-Sporenburg redevelopment that began in 1996, after the completion of KNSM-eiland. The plan called for a low-rise, high-density residential district, on the order of 100 dwelling units per hectare. The Whale is one of three large sculptural blocks or ‘meteorites’ as they were dubbed by Adriaan Geuze from West 8, that were interdicted within this low-rise milieu in the firm’s urban planning vision for the two islands. Together, they were positioned strategically to relate visually to other significant points in the surroundings, including the waterfront and the assertive presence of the Piraeus block. Of the three, only The Whale and the Pacman, located on Borneo island by Koen van Velsen, were materialized; the Fountainhead, designed by Kees Christiaanse, remains unbuilt. Comprising 150 social housing units and another 64 private apartments for rent, the silver-grey, zinc-clad project rises above a sea of brown brick row houses when viewed from afar.
[20]
Up close, the block appears to float above the ground. Beginning with the traditional Berlage perimeter block measuring 100 meters by 50 meters and orienting it length-wise in line with the bridge connecting KNSM-eiland and Sporenburg island, Frits van Dongen then played with the design by lifting the shorter widths, giving emphasis to the two opposite corners. This allowed light to enter into the courtyard from these openings, as well as from above, while permitting views out to the water from both ends as well as into the garden within. Moreover, by elevating the two roof corners, a sloping roof was generated, corresponding to the sun angles at their highest and lowest points.

Designed by West 8, the small courtyard garden continues the silver-grey piscine theme through the placement of four free-standing 18-foot-tall zinc vases along a path laid with Norwegian slate, set within a manicured lawn interspersed with several geometrically-shaped hedges and Gingko trees. Unlike the open courtyards of the Piraeus, this enclosure at The Whale is only visually accessible, meant clearly for viewing and contemplation rather than for occupation and interaction. The ground floor of the project is lined with commercial premises, distinguished from the residential apartments above with their floor-to-ceiling glazed façades. Access to the apartments is limited to the two glass stairways at the base of the building’s lifted corners, connected by L-shaped, or straight, horizontal galleries that alternate between the even- and the odd-numbered floors, and every other floor is linked by a secondary system of stairs grafted to the exterior of the building within the courtyard. These galleries and railings are covered in warm larch wood, contrasting with the cool, metallic finish of the external fenestration with its uniform bands of windows that alternate every other floor. In terms of unit variation, The Whale has a smaller range compared to the Piraeus block, with several standard plans that line the center of each side, and the corners as well as the top levels under the sloped roof and soffit planes occupied by deviations from the norm, including larger units and duplexes. The units are generally divided length-wise in their spatial organization into a living axis as well as a secondary service axis; the bathrooms are typically located in the center of the units, with the kitchen adjacent or right across an internal corridor. Each unit is dual aspect and no more than 14 meters deep, offering views to both the courtyard and the surroundings but also returning again to the fundamental design principle of bringing plenty of light into dwellings. While it does not share the same degree of unit diversity as the Piraeus block, The Whale does accommodate an even higher residential density of 428 dwelling units per hectare.

An iconic submultiple that represents an experiment in generating diversity of unit types taken to a whole other level is the 8 Tallet project by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) completed in 2010. Unlike the brownfield redevelopments undertaken in the two examples above, this project was constructed on a greenfield site in Ørestad, a new five-kilometer strip of development in southern Copenhagen between the historic city and the Kalvebod Fælled (Common) nature reserve. Just 10 minutes to the city center by metro, Ørestad was planned as Copenhagen’s ‘sixth finger’ of urban growth in 1994, and is expected to accommodate 20,000 residents and 60,000 to 80,000 employees by the time it is completely built out.
[21]
Intended to support a highly diverse population as reflected by the range of large and small dwellings in apartment complexes alongside of student dormitories, residence halls, and housing for the elderly, Ørestad was envisioned as a dense, mixed-use, live-work urban quarter with adequate public infrastructure and transit services, and easy access to nature. The master plan for the district was won by a Danish-Finnish studio named ARKKI which subdivided the long strip into four smaller districts, threaded together by a system of canals and waterways as well as the Vestamager metro line that opened early on in 2002 when the districts were under construction. From the outset, the competition brief stipulated “full artistic freedom concerning architectural form, so that the new city quarter… will boast state-of-the-art within architecture and art”.
[22]
Considerable attention was thus paid to design and constructing buildings of outstanding architectural quality through the engagement of both Danish and international architects who were commissioned to undertake projects in a district conceived to be a contemporary, lively, and attractive neighborhood.

In 2006, St. Frederikslund Holding and Høpfner Projects Ltd commissioned the BIG team to design what was then Denmark’s largest private residential development at the very edge of the nature reserve. In particular, this was a collaboration initiated by Per Høpfner who had already formed a working partnership with Bjarke Ingels dating back to two earlier projects also in the Ørestad – the V & M Houses, and the Mountain House – which were designed by PLOT before Ingels and Julien De Smedt parted ways. As at The Whale, the BIG team started with a 10-storey, 230 meters by 110 meters perimeter block. Rather than adhering to the conventional Danish treatment where the variation on the façade is produced as a serial permutation of different waterfront row houses, the team decided instead to stack the functions: they began with a commercial base, followed by a layer of row houses as a modern interpretation of the traditional kartoffelrækkerne or ‘potato rows’ of townhouses with private gardens, another layer of apartments, and finally a tier of penthouses topped by a complete green roof meant to reduce the urban heat-island effect while blending the massive development with its natural environs. This stacking of programs is expressed on the building’s eastern façade, where the glazed commercial layer is topped by three aluminum bands in different shades of grey. A pedestrian pathway connects the Richard Mortensens Vej road west of the complex across a canal to the Hein Heinsens Square on the east, and at the point where this pathway intersects with the block, the team introduced a knot, resulting in the figure of ‘8’ that became a defining feature of the project. Next, several push-and-pull operations were conducted to merge the ground floor commercial units with the street, maximize solar insolation into the two internal courtyards, as well as to create a slope on the south-western edges of the block to maximize views to the water body and the nature reserve beyond. Anchoring the south-western corner of the complex is a popular café servicing the residents and visitors, while the rest of the commercial space is given over to offices, a small grocery store, as well as a childcare center, creating a submultiple with integration of housing and community services.

From Ingels’ perspective, 8 Tallet was designed to be a “three-dimensional neighborhood rather than an architectural object… [w]here social life, the spontaneous encounter, and neighbor interaction traditionally… restricted to the ground level” is allowed to “expand all the way to the top”.
[23]
This ‘three-dimensional’ character of the project takes its form in two key spatial operations: first, the strata of some 150 kartoffelrækkerne townhouses that stretched continuously in a loop from the street level up to four or five storeys above ground and back down again; and second, a public path wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists that winds alongside this townhouse configuration, simulating the sense of an elevated street and sidewalk section that concomitantly maximizes views of the lush reserve and the interior courtyards. The project was similarly very intentional in its landscaping design, creating two contrasting gardens. The smaller, northern courtyard is composed of circular mounds and several trees surrounded by gravel, intimating the topographical elevations generated by the building structure itself. In comparison, the southern courtyard is more expansive, framed by the two green slopes converging upon the café at the south-western corner; the circulation access is demarcated by a black-tiled foot and bicycle path winding around the irregularly-shaped geometrical lawns that are gently terraced for a variety of outdoor activities. Housing a total of 476 dwelling units, ranging from studios to two- to six-room configurations, this submultiple offers a variety of residences with amenities for people in different life stages. Each of these room configurations is no more than 12 meters deep with dual aspect, and they have their own assortment of unit types, amounting to more than 45 different unit variations cleverly disguised in a seemingly straightforward envelope. This extremely high degree of unit diversity stems from the architect’s desire to “offer not one, but many possibilities” of living.
[24]
Area-wise, these units range from 58 square meters to 175 square meters, all of which are relatively commodious in their space provisions. Besides this exceptional degree of diversity, 8 Tallet was also successful in creating a dense live-work environment, attaining a residential density of 188 dwelling units per hectare.

Community and Balances Among Residential and Other Factors

Looking across this material depicting big buildings as submultiples in the pursuit of housing communities, several common issues are present. The first involves striking an appropriate balance among residential and related functions. A core idea of the submultiple typology is an alignment between dwelling and its necessary and desirable non-residential services and suppliers at convenient scales and eases of access. One advantage, in these regards, of big buildings is that they can readily allow for physical proximity and connection within a single facility. A disadvantage is that the scale and number of supporting non-residential facilities can be limited in physical terms to the geometry and scale of the residential aspect of big buildings. In short, footprints, modes of access, and orientations often do not readily match. Also, the inherently deterministic approach used in the development of many big building submultiples can be roundly criticized by simple observations: just because a certain number of dwelling units is sufficient to support a particular facility does not mean that all people in the building will use the facility. On the contrary, the more isolated the facility is from other similar facilities, the less likely it is to survive. Nevertheless, in the relative absence of this determinism in today’s housing environments, it is an open question what is in a big building serving as a submultiple of a non-strictly residential nature. Or to put it the other way around, especially in relatively undeveloped sites either inside or on the edge of urban areas, it is what is not in the big building at the public street level that can present problems of convenience and real neighborly community use.

A second issue involves big buildings and the accommodation of different dwelling unit types. This concerns circumstances of assemblage and how to achieve a certain sense of wholeness alongside of diversity in accommodation. Here, at least four different strategies can be observed. First, and especially in the case of the Unités, relatively generous provision of interlocking and double-height dwelling spaces subject to internal subdivision was combined with insertion of non-residential uses at lower, interlocking, and upper building levels. A result was an ensemble of units and service functions that had a distinct and rather straightforward unity. A second approach involved segmentation of housing into slabs and towers, interlocked and conjoined with other and non-residential facilities. This was particularly apparent in many of the Italian big buildings and submultiples. A third strategy involved differentiation and then integration of units and other functions such that distinct housing types were assembled next to or above and below one another and then tied into relatively unitary schemes, with non-residential functions planned at upper, intermediate, and lower levels. Both 8 Tallet and Via Verde have these characteristics about them. Then finally, there are the more fully inter-mixed deployments of dwelling unit types with variations occurring at relatively close and sometimes regular intervals, all within an otherwise strongly defined building envelope. Throughout, the quality of results seems to depend strongly on the sectional development of the big building, particularly with regard to unit locations, access, intermediary non-residential space inclusions, and the use of residual conditions of stacking and sideways assemblage for particular purposes like terraces, arcades, rooftop gardens, and the like.

A third issue is the making of a distinctly recognizable civic and public space and even one that stands in its representational significance above or outside of its immediate residential environment. As with Rossi and Pouillon and their uses of loggias, galleries, and arcades, this can be accomplished in a monumental manner, or at least in a form that is clearly civic-minded in appearance. It can also be accomplished via well-shaped and developed community and public courtyard spaces as in the Piraeus and The Whale in Holland. In addition, the magnification of a common feature related to dwelling, like its ancillary landscape, can be accomplished to register a community and even civic presence. This is clearly on display at Via Verde in the Bronx of New York City and at 8 Tallet in Copenhagen with cascading gardens and earthworks. Especially at the scale of more or less the equivalent of a neighborhood in a single building, some sense of a collective civic identity seems to be warranted, sometimes if not often complicating the search for an architectural solution for something that has become more than simply a building.

---

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