S'12 Thesis: Razvan Ghilic-Micu

Razvan Ghilic-Micu
M.Arch Thesis Spring 2012
Faculty Advisor: Stan Allen
Field Conditions 2030  |  Tall Urban Density

Contemporary high-rise buildings have become stale monuments to outmoded technologies. The dense city demands the residential high-rise, but current real estate logics, technological limitations, and failures of imagination have lead to a dumb replication of the extruded tower, creating a monotonous and underperforming urbanism in many of the world’s fastest growing cities.

My thesis questions the traditional technologies of high-rise circulation, freeing tall buildings of their normative vertical hierarchies and undermining conventional notions of property, domesticity, and connectivity. By radically rethinking the vertical core, my project mines the architectural opportunities afforded by smart technological co-dependencies between adjacent towers, generating new conditions of field-like urban tissue, programmatic networks, and infrastructural lattices that both quantitatively and qualitatively transform the typology of the urban residential high-rise.