Rui Zhao

High Rise Revolution

Hoarding, Churning, Chaos, Adaptive reuse, Irrationalization, complexity, street life, 

Humans have a crazy addiction to occupying high grounds, such as the current skyscrapers, and former castle. This efficient arrangement of high-rise buildings with concentrated functions has played a key role in the city's development for a while. However, in the post-epidemic era, social conflicts have intensified, wealth distribution has become more uneven, and work patterns have changed. These high-rise buildings have gradually exposed their problems. They will inevitably become a moat for the middle class and the poor, exacerbating the gap between the two.

 The high-rise is a collection of cultural, commercial and entertainment facilities, but it also builds an environment that contribute to segregation. It wipes out vibrant, chaos and complex street life. The collapse of the city begins with turning street life into traffic sewers and abandoning park culture. The street frontage is gone. Public activity is sorted strictly into unfunctional compartments. We hope to bring the vibrant city life back to the high-rise buildings, try to maximize the complexity, and find new adjacencies among the high-rise buildings to fight against simplicity and rationality in the form of curved surfaces and fan shapes. It is an attempt to arouse the government's thinking about urban development and care for the people at the bottom under this rigid city model. Urban diversity comes from prolific, exuberant streets.

This project explores the potential revitalization of high-rise building areas that suffer from a high rate of vacancies and face the risk of abandonment and bring vibrant street life back to people who live and work over sky. Building a new ground between high rise buildings and resisting function oriented and rationalization.

Currently, Downtown San Francisco is suffering a vast number of tower vacancies. The vacancy rate in San Francisco is about 30% or about 35 million square feet, which is not currently being used. We envision using the advantages offered by high-rise structures in the creation of novel communities. High-rise buildings would serve as the backbone of these communities, housing data centers, and storage spaces, seamlessly blending with the surrounding high-rises. By utilizing existing structures and expanding horizontally, each community becomes distinctive, while adhering to certain universal prototypes ranging from residential to cultural buildings.

Extensive interlocking methods between building blocks have been conceived, enabling the connection and growth of the community. Interlocking distinct and various parts to explore new spatial and formal conditions.

Through the deliberate combination of these design prototypes, unexpected spatial experiences and a unique architectural language are generated. They become neighborhoods that are a cluster of daily life connected by new forms of mobility. Those neighborhoods will not be limited by certain programs. Existing towers become storage, data centers, and urban farming to support these new living and working ‘chunks’.