The “tower in the park” is perhaps the most notorious urban form of the 20th century. This book explores the diverse genealogy of this mass housing typology by examining tower-in-the-park developments in seven worldwide cities. By parsing the common formal elements of this typology across geography and time, this analysis lays the groundwork for transforming towers-in-the-park for 21st century.
Many cities have sought to demolish and replace these crumbling dreams of modernist mass housing; yet this thesis posits their use as sites for an architectural intervention. This proposal is founded in a fi rm belief that the richness of a city comes not from a singular vision, idea, or design, but instead from the long-term morphological transformations that deposit new layers of possibility into the existing urban fabric.
