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Highrise with Offices and Apartments
Offices + Apartments
Zurich, Switzerland
1999
Status: Student Project at ETHZ
Engineer: Patrick Gartmann
Collaborators:
This high-rise tower follows the boundary of the building plot and is 120m high - the maximum height of a concrete column before it collapses under its own weight. The width of the core is minimal to support horizontal wind forces - a tenth of its height. The resultant cantilevering space between the core and the building’s outer edge is held up with floor to ceiling concrete wall beams. The floor and ceiling plates attach to them. This means the wall beams are only needed every second floor. They are positioned at eight-meter centres so the floor plates can remain thin, and they double up as the partition walls of the apartments. Every other floor is therefore left support-less and used as large office space. This project is based on the wish to find totally objective criteria to a design with the hope that these would produce a more fundamental architecture than a design of my own hand. I took the physical characteristics of concrete to define form and then two other principles or axioms: the maximum building volume and a column-less free space open to the surrounding city. The result is disappointing, because of the absence of a human touch. The problem may not be the method itself - but the weakness of the initial rules.