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
Towers in a park
Concentrate the business centre in a few very tall towers set far apart on a regular grid, so that they cover only a small fraction of the ground and the rest can be park: density and open space at once.
twenty-four cruciform towers of about sixty storeys; a small fraction of the centre built on
Le Corbusier’s cure for the congested city was, paradoxically, to increase its density at the centre while opening it up. The glass towers, on a cross-shaped plan so that every office has daylight, stand in a regular grid round the central station; beneath and between them is continuous park, with restaurants and shops in low terraces. The same arrangement, applied to the Right Bank of Paris, was the Plan Voisin (1925).
Related rules
Build the house as a standard skeleton of flat concrete slabs, a few columns set back from the slab edges, and a stair; everything else (walls, windows, partitions) is infill that can be placed freely.
3 slabs + 6 columns + 1 stair
With a concrete frame, a house should stand on pilotis, have a free plan and a free façade, be lit by horizontal ribbon windows, and carry a garden on its flat roof.
pilotis · free plan · free façade · ribbon window · roof garden
Raise the main storey on slender columns so that the ground beneath flows under the building (for circulation, cars, gardens or public space) and the rooms are lifted into light, air and view.
Since columns carry the floors, partitions can be placed wherever the use requires, independent of the structure and different on every storey.
House a whole community in one tall slab: stack duplex flats that run through the block with light on both sides, put shops and services on an interior street half-way up, and give the roof to everyone.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Towers in a park”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/ville-contemporaine-towers. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.