Collaboration with Jack Stewart-Castner
Increasing population and urbanization have placed a toll on the contemporary city like never before. Amid rapid rural to urban migration and, and increased economic globalization the city’s datum is moving higher and higher in the sky. The tall building has been superseded by the supertall building and the super tall building superseded by the mega tall building.
Against this backdrop of infinite vertical ambition and responding to increased land scarcity, increased building costs and accelerated building construction deadlines this project proposes a new typography – a horizontal skyscraper that builds upon the existing fabric of the city. New buildings are built on the existing buildings, creating pairs which are joined and linked to create a connected system that exists not only at ground level but at new elevated datums.
In doing so, new typologies and non-traditional relationships can emerge, and movement through the city can occur not only at street level, but above, blurring what one may consider the ground plane and blurring the boundaries between each building, both horizontally and vertically.