The Tower as City

Concept: The Tower as City The proposal redefines the traditional notion of a tower, moving away from the "object-tower" model. Instead, it envisions a vertical city with its own identity—concentrating and intertwining diverse programs: Affordable and flexible housing. Intermediary community spaces. Terraced green areas. Commercial, educational, and cultural hubs. This strategy ensures that the tower is no longer a final destination but becomes an active part of the urban fabric, offering services, connectivity, and opportunities to its immediate surroundings.

Programmatic and Commercial System

The residential core is enhanced through strategically located levels for commercial and service-related activities. These floors function as platforms of social and economic exchange, accommodating small businesses, local markets, and community offices. This model breaks functional segmentation and ensures the economic sustainability of both the building and the neighborhood. This programmatic hybridity allows for: Enriching the living experience. Providing local employment and activating the neighborhood economy. Attracting diverse social actors and promoting integration. Creating an ecosystem that sustains and feeds itself.

Architectural Configuration

The tower is organized through two complementary vertical cores: A technical and rational core that orders circulation, access, and services. A centrifugal community core that links meeting spaces, productive terraces, elevated patios, bridges, and walkways. This layout enables typological flexibility: studios, family units, and shared living spaces are woven together with common-use areas. Vertical movement is accompanied by horizontal community layers. Intermediate voids—transitional spaces, green platforms, and social hubs—interrupt the repetition of floors, creating a diverse and habitable rhythm.

Sustainability and Inclusive Living

The tower complies with European environmental standards, integrating: Solar energy and water harvesting systems. Vegetation on facades and terraces. Passive bioclimatic strategies. Low-impact materials and prefabricated systems. Universal accessibility informs every design decision: barrier-free circulation, functional adaptability, and scalable uses.

Sustainability and Inclusive Living

The tower complies with European environmental standards, integrating: Solar energy and water harvesting systems. Vegetation on facades and terraces. Passive bioclimatic strategies. Low-impact materials and prefabricated systems. Universal accessibility informs every design decision: barrier-free circulation, functional adaptability, and scalable uses.

Urban Proposal

This project also serves as a response to the crisis of the contemporary urban model. By thinking of housing as part of a functional, economic, and affective collective, it aims to restore the notion of community within the vertical city. The tower becomes a collective and productive refuge, a node that links habitable space with urban opportunity.

k-1A

Impact on New York City This proposal is more than a response to the housing crisis—it is a strategic tool for urban regeneration. By inserting a complex and multifunctional vertical structure into a deteriorated area, the project offers tangible and long-term benefits to the city: Revitalizes neglected neighborhoods by injecting new flows of people, services, and commerce. Reinforces social equity, providing access to dignified housing without expelling existing communities. Reduces urban sprawl by densifying responsibly and preserving the ecological footprint. Promotes environmental resilience, with green infrastructure that improves air quality, absorbs water, and reduces heat islands. Stimulates local economies, supporting microenterprises and creating employment within the building itself. Reinvents the vertical typology by transforming isolated towers into urban ecosystems that replicate the richness and diversity of city life. Ultimately, the project seeks to reposition the tower not as an exception, but as a prototype for a new urban paradigm: inclusive, adaptive, and deeply integrated into New York’s future.