NextGenHighrise - Exhibition

The exhibit is part of a research project on socially and environmentally sustainable design. We have been conducting design and construction studies with the ability to adapt to shifting demographics, based on hybrid materiality and enabling circularity. To evaluate their performance we developed computational tools for environmentally concerned design decision-making, with a perspective on the entire life-cycle. As proof of concept studies, we have designed a concept for a generic high-rise type, the Future Hybrid High-rise Commune.

Building up on John Habraken's Open Building concepts, a permanent support structure is complemented with adaptable and relocatable infill modules made of timber. It explores the potential to benefit from the advanced concrete construction technology in the context of a city such as Singapore, and supplements it with regionally resourced timber for an innovative and sustainable construction.

The physical model illustrates the productive tension that we envision between an open-ended, generic architecture and its hybrid appropriation by an inclusive, dynamic urban community. The model  displays its hybrid materiality and  illustrates how the structure can be adapted with the timber modules and facilitate multiple programs, forms of cohabitation and a new kind of urban co-existence.

The physical urban grounds are no more the sole territories for social urban practice and joint decision-making. Urban grounds get tilted and extended ever more into a vertical and digital dimension with intensifying urban growth, shifting demographics and the transition of culture into digital domains. Future hybrid high-rise communes must be entirely open to adapt to demographic, social and communal diversities and evolve with the dynamics of less predictable futures. Future Hybrid Highrise Commune proposes a new model for inclusive high-rise housing that can be applied as generic templates across various contexts.

Visitors are  able to experience and interact a mutual decision-making and collaborative occupation process in an online participation and debate tool. They can physically interact - as if with a doll-house - and play with vehicles, building modules and furniture. Becoming temporary neighbours of a participatory urban community, they can express individual preferences for forms of cohabitation and their location and vote for joint spaces in an interactive game component. An algorithm developed in the research moderates and allocates apartment units based on individual preferences to the real-time vertical neighbourhood.