This design for a Residential Complex for Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia was inserted in an urban master plan for luxurious residences that has been being realized in several stages - the briefing demanded around 900 units, with the maximum height limit of 30 stories, plus commercial and parking area.
In the first design proposal, since it was a luxurious residential complex and due to the proximity with the Petronas Towers, it was established that all apartments should have visual contact towards these towers.
Maximizing the width of the site, as well as the height limit, the layout emerged from obtaining the maximum area maintaining visual contact with the tower – creating a single block – and then shredding it into multiple towers. Within the towers display, distance, light/shadows and prevailing winds were the factors that organized them and anchored them in the squared shape site.
The commercial area was situated on the ground floor, underneath a surface topography. Above it, this clothing surface behaved as a natural forest landscape, where the towers engaged as organic vertical organisms.
Since the view towards the towers was a priority, all apartments we’re on one side, pulling vertical accesses like elevators and stairs towards the back.
Expelled to the exterior, the elevator offers a panoramic view to the dwellers while acceding to their apartment. Formally, these elevators behave also has a back spine, from which were applied several vein or leafs pattern, bifurcating and creating variable balconies in the body of the tower, attributing it a sense of variation while the dwellings floor-plan remains the same.
- -
SITE & PETRONAS TOWERS
- -
DIAGRAMS:generation
- -
3DIMENSIONAL SKIN: balconies generation
- -
- -
PARCEL H+D5 (2)
The second proposal was sustained through a modular principle, where two dwellings (duplex) formed one Unit, containing a common interstitial corridor in-between them. Once the module defined, its array, through established parameters, would work as a form-finding process, where the form would be the outcome of a functioning building meshwork.
The dwellings Display Rule sets the larger group (8 Units = 16 dwellings) to be closer to the ground, in order to have larger open spaces at the same level - the ring building and its inner space becomes permeable; at the middle (variable) level, the grouping is more fragmented (becoming groups of 3 units), and at the top level it becomes a continuous solid ring.
Within this system of rotation and translation of the units, six of them are defined as static, for vertical accesses (elevators and stairs.
The outcome result emerges from orienting/arraying the pre-defined units through a ruling system, organizing the dwellings display and circulation, while creating several formal nuances and relationships.
- -
PLAN: units display at different levels
- -
DIAGRAMMATIC ORGANIZATIONAL ELEVATION: flattened
- -
UNITS; CIRCULATION; DISPLAY
- -
- -
- -
Rhinoceros; Rhinoscript