The Collective Tower, proposed for Tripoli, Lebanon, by Adrian Lahoud addresses the co-existence between different city forms, specifically the small-scaled, fine-grained building divisions within towers and skyscrapers.
More on the project after the break.
Like many cities in the Middle East, Tripoli is an old and finely-grained city with small scale forms that have been developed by tradition and necessity over centuries. With the recent advent of technology and globalism these details are being replaced with generic forms of high-density development. Adrian Lahoud’s proposal explores this problem with a tower that has a reduced footprint that minimally disrupts the fabric of the existing city.
The tower is a flexible triple support structure that transforms to accommodate the many small and variable site conditions that are characteristic of fine-grained sites in older cities. The collective structure is a bundle of three smaller towers joined in the middle for structural stability.
By joining the towers at the middle, two significant changes are introduced; firstly, the public podium level occurs at the mid-rise of the tower, while the ground condition – now shaded by the volume above can take on a more active public character. The project is designed as the collection of a series of semi-autonomous scalar problems. Each problem registers in the building in different ways. The idea is to develop a generic and repeatable strategy at each register.
Architect: Adrian Lahoud Location: Tripoli, Libya Assistants: Alina McConnochie, Sally Hsu, Regan Ching, Erik Escalante
