XXTower is a ghost figure - unoccupied and unoccupiable. The perpetually vacant tower is a response to the spate of new luxury towers that are prominently figuring into the New York City skyline. They contain many residences, but few residents. XXTower is composed of residential wood trusses configured into a rectangular volume and elevated on columns - a mass of lines against the sky. The transparency of XXTower counters the privacy and opacity of the new skyline. In a city where housing is in high demand, is it folly to let the desires of a few shape a city that serves many?
In an economically divided city, is it folly to alter the skyline with new housing that houses no one?
Is it folly that in a city that advocates for the construction of 300sf micro-units, the most prominent towers contain vacant condominiums that average well over 3,000sf?
Is it folly to be critical of that which most of us long to achieve?
New towers loom above New York, the ‘ideal’ that they represent literally and figuratively out of reach for virtually all of the city’s inhabitants. While the majority of the units in these buildings sit vacant for most of the year, there is huge need for more housing in New York.
XXTower is a response to the misguided priorities of the housing market that end up shaping the physical and social fabric of a city, but it is also a more hopeful appeal – that as architects we can pose questions through the critical use of form and material.
The project is formulated around the use of a ubiquitous and unglamorous building component – the residential wood truss - to both subvert its traditional use and illustrate the exaggeration of residence as status symbol.
XXTower is composed of twenty-four roof trusses, cut and assembled to form a rectangular volume elevated on four engineered wood columns. The truss used is one typical to residential construction - a 4:12 slope ‘double howe’ configuration with a twenty-four foot span. Joined along their edges, the trusses will be secured to each other and the four columns with off-the-shelf steel angles and connectors. Complexity is created by repeating a single element. Positioned ten feet above the ground, the lowest truss will be out of reach. The tower is unoccupied, and unoccupiable.
The entire structure will be painted black to not only give all the pieces a uniform appearance and best hide wear, but also allow the figure to stand out starkly against the sky. The overall visual effect - an elevated aggregate of lines - a skeletal tower.
The use of a structural member as it’s basic repeating unit is representative of our intention to make ‘transparent’ the private nature of our built environment by reducing an assembly to its most essential expression - lines of force. But this gesture also reveals the intricacy and intractability (and folly) of its defining systems: economics, class, politics, and history.
XXTower questions the values that are represented by the architecture of the city around us. Is the city in service to its inhabitants, or are its inhabitants in service to a fortunate few? Is it folly for the built environment to manifest an unattainable ideal? What does the American Dream look like in New York?
Status: Competition Entry
