Tower for a Developer
Speculative | NYC | 2011
The skyscraper is one of the most economically constrained building types. While architects strive for formal expression, these efforts are often sharply limited by real-estate pressures and performance ratios: floor-to-floor height, facade-to-area-ratio, building height, and many others. Rather than resist the authority of these industry performance ratios, this project places them at the heart of the creative process. A single equation is written which generates a building form that is parametrically driven both aesthetic, economic, structural and technical constraints including Gross Floor Area, floor to floor height, circulation cores and facade-to-area ratio. An exhaustive preliminary research phase developed a responsive data matrix which examined the efficiencies of each performance ratio in relation to all available permutations of building shape and dimension. This matrix drives a single parametric equation which produces the entire building and all its components. Interlocking residential units, double height commercial space, structural cantilevers and circulation systems are all given by the single equation. The parametric is used to respond to the need for a critically and formally mature architecture which performs on a technical and economic level.