Socializing the Sky: The Typology of Tower Clusters

The book presents the remarkable history of the emergence in the past two decades of a dramatically new design of multi-tower and multi-functional tall building clusters. Based upon a decade of architectural research, the book provides a definition of the new typology, here termed The Tower Cluster, and its major concepts, design characteristics, and the typological knowledge required to design creative sub-variants. It provides the detailed analysis of a large series of outstanding recent case studies of the typology. In addition, the book categorises various types of sky amenities such as sky plazas, sky bridges, sky pools, outlook decks, and other functions that have been, in this new typology, distributed through the vertical order of the tower cluster in order to create a vertical campus containing a designed selection of social, cultural, commercial, and entertainment facilities. The various types of advanced amenities groupings within multi-story residential buildings, hotel buildings, office buildings, and high-tech headquarters/research buildings are presented and discussed in detail. The design knowledge and architectural knowledge of tower clusters and their vertical amenity structures are defined, and the definition and general application of typological knowledge in design provides valuable knowledge base for the future design of creative sub-variants of the tower cluster as well as for their urban and landscape development. The highly articulated knowledge component contained in the book becomes a valuable contribution to the future design of tower clusters as well as to the creation of a model of how to define architectural knowledge. It constitutes a brilliant working guide for the design of new skyscrapers.