Are "self-build" high-rises coming to a city near you?
As urban populations boom, homelessness is rising. While governments and property developers struggle to provide answers, some residents are taking matters into their own hands, by constructing buildings that are rising higher into skylines. And now, some leading architects are redefining their own role from designing buildings to offering guidance for eclectic self-build projects. ETH Prof. Hubert Klumpner believes that city "relics" should be seen as opportunities for resettlement.
Architect Hubert Klumpner, professor of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zurich and ISTP member, argues that there is a strong environmental argument for reusing high-rise buildings. But he is ultimately more interested in how we might live and build, if we were freed from the restrictive idea that buildings should be fixed in their function and floor plan.
For over a year, Klumpner and his partner at the architecture firm Urban Think Tank (U-TT) studied the Torre David in Caracas, which then was home to 3,000 people, shops and restaurants. They found a democratic system that allowed for group decision-making about the tower.
"We're pouring too much concrete. We're making too absolute solutions, thinking we understand what's going to happen in the future, and we are constantly being confronted with a different reality." Hubert Klumpner, ETH Prof.
Klumpner sees potential for the ingenuity displayed by the skyscraper's residents to be harnessed elsewhere. If, as the United Nations predicts, climate change displaces up to 300 million people by 2050, the way we build our cities needs to be "a lot more ephemeral, a lot more elastic, a lot more transitory," said Klumpner.
In planning for the future, we can design healthy, safe neighbourhoods that also open up space for the ingenuity of radical self-builders, he said.
- For further information about Urban Think Tank and Klumpner´s research project as well as his vision of the cities of the future, please visit the external page CNN style news portal.