Rules · Cities · Structure · Theory
Plan the permanent things (the structure, the service routes, the roads) as a lasting framework, and treat the enclosures plugged into it as a kit of standard parts, each renewed at its own rate.
Plug-in City assigned lifespans: forty years for the great service frame, a few years for the living capsules. The high-tech architects built the same idea at the scale of the single building and the business park: long-span sheds of standard components on a regular grid, services exposed and reachable, the roads and utilities laid out first so that buildings can be added, altered and replaced.
Frame a sphere by subdividing the triangular faces of an icosahedron and projecting the points onto the sphere; the triangulated net of short struts spreads loads through the whole surface and encloses the greatest volume for the least material.
full sphere of frequency ν: 30ν² struts, 20ν² triangles, 10ν² + 2 hubs
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
Move ducts, pipes, lifts and escalators out of the building’s core onto its exterior, colour-code them, and let them become the architecture, leaving the interior free and making the plant easy to reach and replace.
Span the whole depth of the building with the structure so that each floor is a single open plate, adaptable to uses that cannot be foreseen.
Pompidou: 48 m clear span between column lines, 13 bays of 12.8 m
Hang the outer wall from the edges of the floor slabs as a continuous skin of glass and metal, independent of the frame behind it, and express its grid of mullions.
skin = vision glass + spandrel panel per floor, on a module of ≈ 1.5 m
Place industry and other large work places in their own zone, served by road and rail, near the housing but separated from it by a belt of green.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Permanent frame, replaceable parts”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/plug-in-city. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.