When we stumbled on James Wines Highrise of Homes (envisioned in 1981) we thought, THAT’S what we need to antidote the sameness of apartment buildings, while providing garden spaces and personal architectural identities, from modernist to Victorian to rustic cabin…
The building is a steel and concrete matrix supporting a vertical community of private homes, clustered into village-like communities on each floor. One of the objectives is to offer a ‘choice, chance and change’ alternative to conventional housing blocks in the cityscape – replacing this imposed anonymity with an anti-formalist collage of indeterminacy, idiosyncrasy and cultural diversity created by the residents themselves.
And of course, that got us thinking about other possibilities in the realm of apartment building…shipping containers stacked on silos, for example…