The city grows and we crowd into it, growing ever closer together. We look for a home, but find little deserving of that name. We pay our deposit and an architect retreats to the studio, designing an average apartment building for the average consumer.  We feel little connection to this place, so our roots are shallow. Our urban life becomes a study in involuntary compromise – we reshape our lives to fit the box we live in. 

This is not the only way.

Instead, we can imagine a system of dynamic feedback: we tell the architect about our lives, and we see our home grow in response. We engage with cutting edge technologies – parametric design, large-scale data collection, immersive 3D representation – not for their own sake, but in our service. We engage in productive dialogue – with the architect, with our new neighbours, and with ourselves – about our housing needs and desires. We make compromises, but voluntary, informed compromises.  We grow a community, and plant our roots deeply. 

Your High-rise Home is a prototype of this system – a schematic design process incorporating direct, individual feedback from residents at all stages, to increase choice and communal identity in high density housing.

Download Your Highrise Home Interactive Preview

Download Your Highrise Home Booklet

During the 2012 European Architecture Student Assembly, I joined a group of 12 to create a small pavilion investigating the control and manipulation of light. Designed and built collaboratively over 2 weeks in Helsinki, the project centred on this Northern city’s long summer days - where residents experience near-constant sunlight. The visitor peels open a 7 metre long pivoting wall and steps inside the narrow space, the door closing behind to create a near-total darkness. At the far end, a counter-weighted tilting wall gives the user direct, bodily control over the amount of light entering the structure.

What scale is your city?
Tokyo’s futures are a matter of constant contention. The rich low-city tradition of dense, socially functional and internally complex communities is today endangered by the ascendant mode - towers in the park which have atomised existing neighbourhoods across the city. By proposing an interstitial development shot through with pathways and mixed uses, Homescale would restate the value of fine-grained urbanism in contemporary Tokyo, in turn strengthening the traditional city’s claim to existence.

Every city is a complex place, but the expression of that complexity is never a foregone conclusion. If we value an expressive city, we must find ways to manifest complexity in our urban environments - and to push back against the forces which would wipe it away.