Postskyscraper

Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia

2023

X-URBAN design studio

This studio explores the possibility of designing collective forms of urban verticality beyond the logic of the skyscraper. Historically, this building form has operated as a singular (Manfredo Tafuri´s phrasing) “self-contained machine” that a) is based on a now unviable carbon-based model of material construction; b) exhibits a linear or straightforward ‘verticality’; and c) is circumscribed (almost exclusively) to the functional straitjacket of a ‘business’ typology (the traditional office tower) and a locational commitment to ‘the city’. Reimagining large-scale urban form after the skyscraper, in the age of climate change, planetary-scale urbanization & computation then entails, correspondingly, rethinking its coordinates along a) a new construction and structural post-carbon logic, one that fits the demands of the ongoing and fast deepening climatic crisis; b) a new formal, post-vertical typological configuration, one less concerned with iconic representation and more with environmental performance in increasingly volumetric urban conglomerates; and c) a new functional and locational set of spatial demands from the variety of more-than-human actants and landscapes that define our infrastructurally-, computationally-, and algorithmically mediated urban world.

Syllabus