Stacking Typologies

A series of pagoda-like towers sketched by Oliver Pershav while he was a student at the Architectural Association in London. Image © Oliver Pershav.

When designing a skyscraper, an architect usually takes a holistic approach. This means the entire building is designed with a common strategy, which usually translates into a single aesthetic. In short, each building has a style. Styles can range from Modern to High-Tech to Neo-Gothic to Deconstructivist, among plenty of others. Throughout history, these styles have usually emerged as a result of a specific historical context, and in skyscraper design they’re rarely mixed together, especially in a single building.

The most common way to approach the design of a tall building is the tri-partite strategy, first proposed by Louis Sullivan in his hugely influential article The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered from 1896. Sullivan argued for a three-part strategy, consisting of a base, a shaft and a crown. The base would meet the ground plane and interact with the surrounding city. The shaft would sit on top of the base and consisted of identical floors stacked on top of one another. The crown would then sit on top of the shaft, and would terminate the composition against the sky. Together, these three parts would come together into a unified whole.[1] Sullivan was essentially applying the logic of a classical column to the skyscraper.

The tripartite strategy has been in practice since Sullivan’s article was published, and it’s still used today. One assumed aspect of the strategy is a common style throughout all three parts to help unify everything together. What happens when you start mixing styles together? At the surface, this would sound like blasphemy to most architects practicing today. Not only is it an aesthetic no-no during the design process, but it introduces complexity and cost to the construction process.

I began this piece with a series of pagoda-like towers sketched by an architecture student. Each of the towers is a mish-mash of styles, resulting in visually-interesting objects that don’t seem to follow any aesthetic logic. The towers are a series of unrelated vignettes stacked on top of one another. What would happen if this strategy was applied to a skyscraper? At first glance, this seems like an unreasonable strategy, but with the rise of 3d-printing technologies and mass-customization, it becomes a possibility.

This has been accomplished before, just not at the same scale as a skyscraper. At the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany, the Dutch pavilion stacked different types of space on top of one another, creating a similar type of mish-mash than the pagoda towers above.

Section of the Dutch pavilion, built for the 2000 World’s Fair in Hannover, Germany. The project consisted of unique layers stacked vertically, each with a different structure and use.

Let’s ponder the mish-mash at the scale of the skyscraper. First, in the interest of cost, the mish-mash would have to be limited to the facade, or exterior skin of the building. Everything behind the facade would need to be standardized, including the structure and the program. This severely limits the variety of the interior experience, but it’s not unlike Sullivan’s buildings, which were wonderfully expressive on the exterior but the structure beneath was a simple steel skeleton. The Dutch pavilion took the mish-mash and applied it to all elements of the exterior and interior, and it got away with it because of its size and the fact that it was a one-off. In addition, it didn’t really have a client, per se, so the architect wasn’t beholden to any specific cost or profit models.

Second, the different styles of mish-mash would need to be unitized. Nearly all towers that get built today use some sort of unitized facade system, which involves modules, or pieces, of the facade that get pre-built off-site so on-site work is easier and faster. For the mish-mash, some sort of unitized module would need to be common among each style. Without this, any design would struggle to be buildable, and like the first point it would cause costs to skyrocket.

The third is the nature of the mish-mash itself. What benefit does it provide to the building? It’s visually interesting, for sure, but is that alone worth the added cost of making every floor unique? Why go to all the trouble of making every floor appear unique from the outside if the interior experience isn’t unique as well? It’s a tough question to answer, and it brings everything back to cost. If a client is going to spend a great deal of money to make the mish-mash meaningful, it needs to produce value in other places to offset the cost. The main path to extra value would be higher costs to occupy the building because of the uniqueness of the experience, but this would be very difficult to achieve.

I’ve previously written about the need for unique experiences within our tall buildings, and how they can and have been achieved. I don’t believe a mish-mash of architectural styles is one of these, however, and the above musings illustrate this point. The mish-mash makes for visually interesting drawings and one-off pavilions, but when applied at-scale to a tall building, the cost-benefit ratio seems too difficult to figure out in nearly every circumstance. Skyscrapers are terribly expensive to build, so any innovation that adds cost would need to be offset by cost-cutting in other areas. Otherwise they’re just cool sketches by a university student.


[1]: Sullivan, Louis H. "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." Lippincott's Magazine, March 1896, 403-09.