Strolling Around
Vertical Life - Bring Urban Context to Highrise
Time: 2018 Winter
Team: Adrian Bachman, Constanze Bieber, Zhixiao Zheng
Role: Researcher, Architectural Designer
Tool: Rhino, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign
What is Strolling Around?
Vertical life is the theme of 2018 AAC Workshop Spring, which selects 20 students all over the world and is supported by gmp architekten. This topic is based on the phenomenon in Shenzhen, where highrises have spread all over the city in recent years. But how can we seek for the quality in highrise buildings and what is the future vertical life?
Story of strolling around begins with the experience of wandering in the city, which is composed of surprises containing urban quality. This kind of experience is somehow lost when we enter a highrise building. So, we are thinking of bringing this feature back into our vertical life and how…
That is the reason why we choose to turn Nolly plan which is defined as the quality of urban design for centuries into vertical language. Why don’t we learn from the space this plan created and try to input it into our vertical city?
Site Analysis
Concept & Design
The Idea of a stroll through the city with its characteristic situations results in the engagement with urban and architectural archetypes such as church, market, school, etc. These archetypes are translated into spatial volumes and represent the public spaces and functions. Clearly legible from afar they broadcast the perceptibility of the building and invite the public to explore the vertical city.
The squares and places with their respective functions such as market hall, theatre, or spiritual chambers are connected by a variety of vertical access routes. This creates a network of squares and public buildings with the more private “streets” that allow access to the less public and private areas. Those spaces are encased into the urban mass consisting of the required uses of office, hotel and residential.
In the building section, we can see that public spaces distribute on different floors of the building. Here, the diagram below shows the special 6 shapes of spaces. They are library, market, kindergarten, church, gym, and rooftop.
And, these are the interior views of the church and the market place.
Handmade Models
In order to prepare for the exhibition both in Germany and in China, we made two models for this design project, one in urban scale, and the other in building scale.
The left one is the city scale model by 3D printing. And the right one is the building scale model made by black boards which were stacked together.
