AMSTERDAM HIGH
Superliving

Münster University of Applied Sciences, MSA
summerterm 2005

Final results (e.g..): Project 01 (Katja Groeger, Daniel Skrobek); Project 02 (Jürgen Wittner, David Rüschendorf, Jan Tillmanns) --->

Not only while looking at huge booming asian megacities it seems that highrises for housing have not lost their up-to-dateness however they have been fought as clichéd urban disasters of the 1960s/70s in the past decades.

The opposite seems to be the case. Highly densified urban settings are obviously unavoidable to cope with the unbalanced agglomeration of people around the globe. Still, besides its advantages the type itself contains its disproof as a necessary response to contemporary forms of societies and economical forces: inhumanity through scale, anonymity, monotony and bore by repetition and exclusiveness by disconnection.

Thus our starting point for a bachelor design-studio that we held in summer 2005 has been the challenging of highrise-typologies to develop and deliver concepts that go beyond a common notion of what a tower could or better should do as part of a city.

One of the most important masterplan projects of the Netherlands has started to become reality. The so called Zuid-As area in Amsterdam will contain several blocks of highrise-buildings filled with all kinds of program such as offices, housing, service, a new traffic hub, etc. This new quarter is located outside the city centre of Amsterdam but still within walking distance to some of the most attractive leisure assets of the city. Furthermore it will be well connected to all means of local, regional, national and international traffic. From here Rotterdam is reachable within one hour by train, London and Paris within two hours by plane, Frankfurt within four hours by train.

However, again the problematic role of highrises as part of an urban setting has not been questioned or solved, yet. Therefore we have worked out a complex three-dimensional masterplan that allows for horizontal movement where there was only vertical distribution of program, multiplicity instead of monotony and that connects programs and people instead of separating them: a new layer of urban space is applied in between the towers. This means that the classical organizational principle of a tower with only one connection at its bottom is given up in favour of up to two new connections to neighbouring buildings along the shafts.

In groups our students have done an intense research into existing and interesting highrises to learn about principles of connection and movement, distribution of program and hybridization as well as formal and volumetric developments. Based on these studies they have developed prototypical design principles in order to organize the massive amount of program of these buildings as well as the complexity of their connections to result in an integrative design approach. These design principles had to be focused on pragmatics instead on formal or conceptual preferences. Thus the architectonical outcome of the projects is the consequence of a research-based "form-finding" process instead of a traditional "form-giving" procedure.

In their best cases the final design results reflect this approach showing the integral thinking of an architectonical approach as organizational system.

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