A 75 story skyscraper rises in its vertical dimension the equivalent of five Manhattan city blocks. And, where a city block thrives spatially from constant change, the standard skyscraper resists such change, presenting itself as a self-similar aggregation of parts (at its best) regardless of the programmatic variation represented on the interior. Generic both visually and spatially, this type of building persists due to a heritage, as old as the typology itself, of modernist repetition which fetishizes homogeneity.
Our design proposes a continually shifting mediation of two systems – one hard and one soft, one structural and one enveloping, one open and open closed. Always coexisting, these two systems compete for dominance, continually reforming their relationships based on this symbiosis as well as outside forces of the city.