Tower block

"Tower Block" and "High-rise" redirect here. For the film, see Tower Block (film). For other uses, see High Rise (disambiguation).

A high-rise residential apartment building in Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong

One of a pair of 47-story high-rise residential complexes, a ubiquitous feature of the borough of Fort Lee, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States, in the New York City Metropolitan Area, with several over 90 metres (300 ft) tall.

A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building or structure used as a residential and/or office building. In some areas it may be referred to as an "MDU", standing for "Multi Dwelling Unit". In the United States, such a structure is referred to as an apartment building or office building, while a group of such buildings is called an apartment complex or office complex.

High-rise buildings became possible with the invention of the elevator (lift) and cheaper, more abundant building materials. The materials used for the structural system of high-rise buildings are reinforced concrete and steel. Most North American style skyscrapers have a steel frame, while residential blocks are usually constructed of concrete. There is no clear difference between a tower block and a skyscraper, although a building with fifty or more stories is generally considered a skyscraper.

High-rise structures pose particular design challenges for structural and geotechnical engineers, particularly if situated in a seismically active region or if the underlying soils have geotechnical risk factors such as high compressibility or bay mud. They also pose serious challenges to firefighters during emergencies in high-rise structures. New and old building design, building systems like the building standpipe system, HVAC systems (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), fire sprinkler system and other things like stairwell and elevator evacuations pose significant problems. Studies are often required to ensure that pedestrian wind comfort and wind danger concerns are addressed. In order to allow less wind exposure, to transmit more daylight to the ground and to appear more slender, many high-rises have a design with setbacks.

Apartment buildings have technical and economic advantages in areas of high population density, and have become a distinctive feature of housing accommodation in virtually all densely populated urban areas around the world. In contrast with low-rise and single-family houses, apartment blocks accommodate more inhabitants per unit of area of land and decrease the cost of municipal infrastructure.

Definition

Various bodies have defined "high-rise":

• Emporis Standards defines a high-rise as "A multi-story structure between 35–100 meters tall, or a building of unknown height from 12–39 floors."
• According to the building code of Hyderabad, India, a high-rise building is one with four floors or more, or 15 to 18 meters or more in height.
• The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a high-rise as "a building having many storeys".
• The International Conference on Fire Safety in High-Rise Buildings defined a high-rise as "any structure where the height can have a serious impact on evacuation"
• In the U.S., the National Fire Protection Association defines a high-rise as being higher than 75 feet (23 meters), or about 7 stories.
• Most building engineers, inspectors, architects and similar professionals define a high-rise as a building that is at least 75 feet (23 m) tall.

History

These tower blocks were built in Shibam, Yemen in the 16th century, and are the tallest mudbrick buildings in the world

High-rise apartment buildings had already appeared in antiquity: the insulae in ancient Rome and several other cities in the Roman Empire, some of which might have reached up to ten or more stories, one reportedly having 200 stairs. Because of the destruction caused by poorly built high-rise insulae collapsing, several Roman emperors, beginning with Augustus (r. 30 BC – 14 AD), set limits of 20–25 meters for multi-story buildings, but met with limited success, as these limits were often ignored despite the likelihood of taller insulae collapsing. The lower floors were typically occupied by either shops or wealthy families, while the upper stories were rented out to the lower classes. Surviving Oxyrhynchus Papyri indicate that seven-story buildings even existed in provincial towns, such as in third century AD Hermopolis in Roman Egypt.

In Arab Egypt, the initial capital city of Fustat housed many high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people. Al-Muqaddasi, in the 10th century, described them as resembling minarets, while Nasir Khusraw, in the early 11th century, described some of them rising up to 14 stories, with roof gardens on the top story complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them. By the 16th century, Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.

The skyline of many important medieval cities was dominated by large numbers of high-rising urban towers, which fulfilled defensive but also representative purposes. The residential Towers of Bologna numbered between 80 and 100 at a time, the largest of which still rise to 97.2 m. In Florence, a law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings should be reduced to a height of less than 26 m, the regulation immediately put into effect. Even medium-sized towns such as San Gimignano are known to have featured 72 towers up to 51 m in height.

The Hakka people in southern China have adopted communal living structures designed to be easily defensible in the forms of Weilongwu (围龙屋) and Tulou (土楼), the latter are large, enclosed and fortified earth building, between three and five stories high and housing up to 80 families. The oldest still standing tulou dates back from the 14th century.

Tower blocks were built in the Yemeni city of Shibam in the 16th century. The houses of Shibam are all made out of mud bricks, but about five hundred of them are tower houses, which rise five to sixteen stories high, with each floor having one or two apartments. This technique of building was implemented to protect residents from Bedouin attacks. While Shibam has existed for around two thousand years, most of the city's houses date from the 16th century. The city has the tallest mud buildings in the world, some more than 30 meters (100 feet) high. Shibam has been called "one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction" or "Manhattan of the desert".

Currently, the tallest high-rise apartment building in the world is Chicago's John Hancock Center, constructed under the supervision of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1969. The building has 100 stories and stands 344 meters tall.

Modern development

A house in Steinfurt, Westphalia, Germany, forming a "Y"

The residential tower block with its typical concrete construction are a familiar feature of Modernist architecture. Influential examples include Le Corbusier's "housing unit" his Unité d'Habitation, repeated in various European cities starting with his Cité radieuse in Marseille (1947–52), constructed of béton brut, rough-cast concrete, as steel for framework was unavailable in post-war France. Residential tower blocks became standard in housing urban populations displaced by slum clearances and "urban renewal".

Highrise projects after World War II typically rejected the classical designs of the early skyscrapers, instead embracing the uniform international style; many older skyscrapers were redesigned to suit contemporary tastes or even got demolished - such as New York's Singer Building, once the world's tallest skyscraper. However, with the movements of Postmodernism, New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, that established since the 1980s, a more classical approach came back to global skyscraper design, that is popular today.

Other contemporary styles and movements in highrise design include organic, sustainable, neo-futurist, structuralist, high-tech, deconstructivist, blob, digital, streamline, novelty, critical regionalist, vernacular, Neo Art Deco and neo-historist, also known as revivalist.

Europe

See also: Panelák and Plattenbau

Central and Eastern Europe

Nowa Huta in Kraków, Poland, serves as one of the best examples of socialist realism, with its street hierarchy resembling Paris

Painted paneláks in Prague, Czech Republic

Although some Central and Eastern European countries during the interwar period, such as the Second Polish Republic, already started building housing estates that were considered to be of a very high standard for their time, many of these structures perished during the Second World War.

In the Eastern Bloc, tower blocks were constructed in great numbers to produce plenty of cheap accommodation for the growing postwar populations of the USSR and its satellite states. This took place mostly in the 50s, 60s and 70s of the 20th century, though in the People's Republic of Poland this process started even earlier due to the severe damages that Polish cities sustained during World War II. Throughout the former Eastern Bloc countries, tower blocks built during the Soviet years make up much of the current housing estates and most of them were built in the specific socialist realist style of architecture that was dominant in the territories east of the Iron Curtain. In Romania, mass construction of standardized apartment blocks occurred under the systematization programme of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who, after a 1971 visit in North Korea, was impressed by the Juche ideology of that country. Systematization consisted largely of the demolition and reconstruction of existing villages, towns, and cities, in whole or in part, in order to build blocks of flats (blocuri). In the Czech Republic and Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia), panelák building under communism resulted from two main factors: the postwar housing shortage and the ideology of communist Czechoslovak leaders.

Nowadays, in Eastern European countries, opinions about these buildings vary greatly, with some deeming them as eyesores on their city's landscape while others glorify them as relics of a bygone age. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the former Eastern Bloc countries have begun construction of new, more expensive and modern housing. The Śródmieście borough of Warsaw, the capital of Poland, has seen the development of an array of skyscrapers. Russia is also currently undergoing a dramatic buildout, growing a commercially shaped skyline. Moreover, the ongoing changes made to postwar housing estates since the 2000s in former communist countries vary - ranging from simply applying a new coat of paint to the previously grey exterior to thorough modernization of entire buildings.

In the European Union, among former communist states, a majority of the population lives in flats in Latvia (65.1%), Estonia (63.8%), Lithuania (58.4%), Czech Republic (52.8%) and Slovakia (50.3%) (as of 2014, data from Eurostat). However, not all flat dwellers in Eastern Europe live in communist era blocks of flats; many live in buildings constructed after the fall of communism, and some in buildings surviving from the era before communism.

Great Britain

The three tower blocks of the Crossways Estate in Bow, London, United Kingdom, before their refurbishment

Tower blocks were built in the UK after the Second World War. The first residential tower block, "The Lawn" was constructed in Harlow, Essex in 1951; it is now a Grade II listed building. In many cases tower blocks were seen as a "quick-fix" to cure problems caused by crumbling and unsanitary 19th-century dwellings or to replace buildings destroyed by German aerial bombing. It was argued that towers surrounded by public open space could provide the same population density as the terraced housing and small private gardens they replaced, offering larger rooms and improved views whilst being cheaper to build. Initially, they were welcomed, and their excellent views made them popular living places. Later, as the buildings themselves deteriorated, they grew a reputation for being undesirable low cost housing, and many tower blocks saw rising crime levels, increasing their unpopularity. One response to this was the great increase in the number of housing estates built, which in turn brings its own problems. In the UK, tower blocks particularly lost popularity after the partial collapse of Ronan Point in east London in 1968.

Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, is believed to contain the highest concentration of tower blocks in the UK: examples include the Hutchesontown C blocks in the Gorbals and the 20-storey blocks in Sighthill. However, on the whole, London has the largest number of high-rise residential buildings in the UK.

The post-war British tower block vision

Post-war Britain was the stage for a tower block "building boom"; from the 1950s to the late 1970s there was a dramatic increase in tower block construction. During this time, local authorities desired to impress their voters by building futuristic and imposing tower blocks, which would signify post-war progress. Both Patrick Dunleavy and Lynsey Hanley agree that architects and planners were influenced by Le Corbusier’s promotion of high-rise architecture. The modern tower blocks were to include features that would foster desired forms of resident interaction, an example being the inclusion of Le Corbusier’s streets in the sky in some estates.

As well as inspiring residents, local authority planners believed that the way tower blocks were constructed would save money. Generally, the tower blocks were built on cheap greenfield land skirting established cities. Although the property prices for these periphery sites were markedly cheaper than their inner city counterparts, they often had little access to public amenities, such as public transport. It was thought that the implementation of industrialised building techniques would lower costs too, as similar tower blocks would be replicated over many sites. Uniform and standardised parts, such as toilet fittings and door handles, would be fitted throughout many tower blocks; planners deemed that buying in bulk would reduce overall costs.

Another key aspect of the tower block vision was the Brutalist architectural method, popular with architects and planners at the time. The Brutalist emphasis led to the construction of stark and striking tower blocks with large sections of exposed concrete. Concrete was to be an integral part of the tower block designs; it could be poured on site, offering boundless flexibility to the building designers. To the planners, concrete was a silver bullet for the construction process – it was economical, and "was vaunted as being long-lasting, if not indestructible".

The post-war British tower block reality

Elmet Towers in Swarcliffe, Leeds, showing the dereliction that led to its demolition

Coleman's 1985 work argues that in trying to emulate Le Corbusier's ideas, the tower block planners only succeeded in encouraging social problems. Although architects and local authorities intended the opposite, tower blocks quickly became, as Hanley sharply stated, 'slums in the sky'. Due to demanding deadlines, complicated construction practices were rushed and many tower blocks experienced structural decay as a result – roofs leaked, concrete suffered spalling, steel corroded, and damp penetrated the buildings. Unfortunately, by replicating tower blocks across the nation, planners 'disastrously' replicated design faults. In many tower blocks, concrete quickly exhibited signs of decay; cracks soon formed and destabilised the buildings. The partial collapse of the Ronan Point tower block is an infamous example of the hasty and substandard construction that occurred in a number of the towers. The tower blocks quickly lost their "futuristic" look; concrete turned from the crisp white the designers had imagined to a dull grey, stained by pollution.

Poor design decisions ruined the anticipated benefits of the buildings. Open spaces, which were supposed to benefit the residents, were instead unattractive, unused and inadequately supervised. Residents felt it was difficult to maintain the large open spaces around the blocks because they realistically belonged to no one. Social problems increased as the tower blocks quickly degraded because of poor maintenance and an insecure communal environment. Apart from frequent break-downs, communal lifts were a source of fear for people travelling alone. It was a rarity to "enter a clean-smelling, undefaced lift". The tower blocks, many of which were on the periphery of the city, made residents feel isolated and cut off from society. Outsiders and newcomers were also affected; they felt the overbearing design of the tower blocks made them fearsome and unsociable.

Power argues that as a direct consequence of their design and construction, security problems were prevalent in many of the tower blocks. Break-ins, vandalism and muggings were common, which were aided by the buildings' concealed areas, the mazes of internal corridors, and dark corners. Police were often required in the tower blocks, but their infrequent presence did little to pacify towers rife with delinquency. To contain disruptive behaviour, local authorities began to place "problem families" in the same blocks; Hanley argues that this policy only led to "further alienation ... nihilism and a creeping sense of lawlessness". Dunleavy seconds this, suggesting that the mental health of long-term tower block residents may have been detrimentally affected.

While local authorities and their architects intended to create tower blocks that encouraged harmonious and vibrant communities, often the results were far from ideal. Post-war tower blocks were compromised from the outset by a combination of faults: local authorities advocated impractical architectural methods; design and construction faults were frequently reproduced; and there appeared to be a lack of understanding about the social consequences of certain design features. Collectively, these oversights transformed many tower blocks into undesirable places to live.

High-rise apartment buildings of the "Komplex Leipziger Straße" in Berlin-Mitte.

Fire safety

Compliant protections for residents in tower blocks can be very expensive to retrofit, and lessors (such as local authorities) have been sued for lack of a current fire safety inspection, or implementation of its recommendations. Ed Davey MP commented regarding a life-claiming 2009 fire that many blocks in the UK remained inadequate. North Ayrshire Council has decided to remove plastic cladding from its buildings following a fatal fire in a tower block. Poor maintenance of electrical equipment, fire doors and other features has caused widespread fire hazards and residents are asked to pay part of the cost of putting this right even though the problem is due to poor maintenance and errors in design.

Tower blocks may be inherently more prone to casualties from a fire because people living on higher floors cannot escape fires easily and the fire brigade cannot reach the higher floors quickly. In buildings with more than a hundred residents, ensuring that every single resident acts responsibly to minimize fire risk is difficult; poorer residents in tower blocks may be tempted to use cheaper flammable fuels rather than electricity, they are also more likely to be smokers (carelessness with cigarettes is a major cause of home fires), and they are more likely to have old furniture, not made to modern fire safety standards. Fire safety legislation introduced in 2006 requires new high rise buildings to be built to higher safety standards with sprinkler systems; the same standards do not apply to pre-2006 tower blocks, which contain a greater proportion of poor people. Recent studies have investigated the combined use of egress components (e.g., stairs and elevators) to enhance the effectiveness of evacuation strategies in case of fire.

Towards the present day

The 31-story Red Road estate in Glasgow, the tallest public housing towers in Europe at the time of their construction. Like many 1960s British high-rises, they are now condemned.

In recent years, some council or ex-council high-rises in the United Kingdom, including Trellick Tower, Keeling House, Sivill House and The Barbican Estate, have become popular with young professionals due to their excellent views, desirable locations and architectural pedigrees, and now command high prices. There are plans to redevelop the Little London and Lovell Park areas on the fringes of Leeds city centre into luxury flats for 'Young Urban Professionals'. The plans entail demolishing all of the council housing and refurbishing the highrise flats. This demand has led to many councils rethinking plans regarding their demolition.

In Glasgow, similar initiatives have taken place – in 2011, the Glasgow Housing Association saved one of a cluster of three condemned tower blocks in the Ibrox area with the help of government grants to transform it into desirable rented housing for young professionals. Glasgow itself has taken a more measured approach to its high-rise housing stock, eschewing the mass demolition programmes being practiced in other British cities – favouring selective refurbishment of estates with secure futures and on buildings in good structural condition, only razing towers where absolutely necessary.

After a gap of around 30 years, new high-rise flats are once again being built in Belfast, Birmingham (some are for wealthy people, e.g. The Mailbox, others are student accommodation), Cardiff, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle upon Tyne; but this time sometimes for wealthy professionals, rather than the "lower classes." Their developers market these properties by using the American term 'apartment buildings', perhaps in an effort to distance these newer buildings from the older tower blocks from the 1950s and 1960s. These are usually taller than their older counterparts and generally built in and around these provincial city centres. They are often glass and aluminium clad. Tonight with Trevor McDonald highlighted that in Leeds and Manchester (perhaps the cities that had seen most development) only approximately half were occupied and with owner occupation often being as low as 10%. In Southend there are controversial plans to build new tower blocks for social housing, a supporter claims this will be cheaper than paying to house poor people with private landlords while opponents fear the creation of Ghettos.

Ireland

Flats in Ballymun, Dublin, Ireland

Republic of Ireland

In Dublin, the Ballymun Flats were built between 1966 and 1969: seven 15-story towers, nineteen 8-story blocks and ten 4-story blocks. These were the "seven towers" referred to in the U2 song "Running to Stand Still". They have since been demolished. Inner Dublin flat complexes include Sheriff Street (demolished), Fatima Mansions (demolished and redeveloped), St. Joseph's Gardens (demolished; replaced by Killarney Court flat complex), St. Teresa's Gardens, Dolphin House, Liberty House, St. Michael's Estate and O'Devaney Gardens and a lot more mainly throughout the North and South Inner City of Dublin. Suburban flat complexes were built exclusively on the northside of the city in Ballymun, Coolock and Kilbarrack. These flats were badly affected by a heroin epidemic that hit working-class areas of Dublin in the 1980s and early 90s.

Over the last five years the largest cities such as Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway have witnessed new large apartment building. Some large towns such as Navan, Drogheda, Dundalk and Mullingar have also witnessed lots of modern apartments being built.

Northern Ireland

Tower blocks in Northern Ireland were never built to the frequency as in cities on the island of Great Britain. Most tower blocks and flat complexes are found in Belfast although many of these have been demolished since the 1990s and replaced with traditional public housing units. The mid-rise Divis flats complex in west Belfast was built in between 1968 and 1972. It was demolished in the early 1990s as the residents demanded new houses due to mounting problems with the flats. Divis Tower, built separately in 1966, still stands, however; and in 2007 work began to convert the former British Army base at the top two floors into new dwellings. Divis Tower was for several decades Ireland's tallest residential building, having since being surpassed by the privately owned Obel Tower in the city centre. In the north of the City, the iconic 7 towers complex in the New Lodge remains, although so too the problems that residents face, such as poor piping and limited sanitation. Farther north, the four tower blocks in Rathcoole dominate the local skyline, while in south Belfast, the tower blocks in Seymour Hill, Belvoir & Finaghy remain standing.

Most of the aforementioned high rise flats in the city were built by the Northern Ireland Housing Trust (NIHT) as part of overspill housing schemes, the first such development being the pair of point blocks in East Belfast's Cregagh estate. These eleven-story towers were completed in 1961 and were the first tall council housing blocks on the island of Ireland. The NIHT also designed the inner city Divis Flats complex. The six to eight story deck access flats that comprised most of the Divis estate were of poor build quality and were all demolished by the early 1990s. Similar slab blocks were built by the NIHT in East Belfast (Tullycarnet) and Derry's Bogside area, all four of which have been demolished.

Belfast Corporation constructed seven tower blocks on the former Victoria Barracks site in the New Lodge district. While the Corporation built some mid-rise flats as part of slum clearance schemes (most notably the now demolished Unity Flats and the 'Weetabix Flats in the Shankill area), New Lodge would be their only high rise project in the inner city with three more in outlying areas of the city during the 1960s, two being in Mount Vernon in North Belfast and one being in the Clarawood estate, East Belfast. The Royal Hospital built three thirteen-story towers for use as staff accommodation, prominently located adjacent to the M2 Motorway at Broadway. Belfast City Hospital also constructed a high rise slab block which since privatisation has been named Bradbury Court, formerly known as Erskine House. Queens University Belfast built several eleven storey towers at their Queens Elms student accommodation. Of the three sixteen-story point blocks of Larne Borough Council in the late 1960s, only one remains.

Asia

Residential tower complexes are common in Asian countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea as urban densities are very high. In Singapore and urban Hong Kong, land prices are so high that a large portion of the population lives in high-rise apartments. In fact, over 60% of Hong Kong residents live in apartments, many of them condominiums.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen (2012) celebrated the work of innovative architecture firms such as WOHA (based in Singapore), Mass Studies (based in Seoul), Amateur Architecture Studio (based in Hangzhou), and the New York City-based Steven Holl in the transformation of residential towers into "vertical communities" or "vertical cities in the sky" providing aesthetic, unusually designed silhouettes on the skyline, comfortable private spaces and attractive public spaces. None of these "functional, handsome, and humane high-rise residential buildings" are affordable housing.

South Korea

File:Koreatyp01.jpg

Typical Tower block apartment in South Korea

In South Korea the tower blocks are called Apartment Complex (아파트 단지). The first residential towers began to be built after the Korean War. The South Korean government needed to build many apartment complexes in the cities to be able to accommodate the citizens. In the 60 years since, as the population increased considerably, tower blocks have become more common. This time however the new tower blocks integrated shopping malls, parking systems and other convenient facilities.

Samsung Tower Palace in Seoul, South Korea, is the tallest apartment complex in Asia.

In Seoul, approximately 80% of its residents live in apartment complexes which comprise 98% of recent residential construction. Seoul proper is noted for its population density, almost twice that of New York and eight times greater than Rome, though slightly less than Paris. Its metropolitan area is the densest in the OECD.

China

The 2012 Pritzker Prize was awarded to Chinese architect Wang Shu. Among his winning designs is the Vertical Courtyard Apartments, six 26-story towers built in Hangzhou, China, by his architectural firm, Amateur Architecture Studio. "These towers were designed to house two-storey apartments, in which every inhabitant would enjoy “the illusion of living on the second floor”, accomplished by folding concrete floor planes (like “bamboo mats,” claims the firm), so that every third story opens into a private courtyard. In the larger towers, the two-story units are stacked slightly askew, adding to the visual interest of the variegated façades (Goldhagen 2012)."

Americas

Residential buildings in Santa Fe, Mexico City, Mexico

Canada

See also: List of tallest buildings in Canada

In Canada large multi-family buildings are usually known as apartment buildings or apartment blocks if they are rented from one common landowner, or condominiums or condo towers if each dwelling unit is individually owned; they may be called low-rise (or walk-up), mid-rise, high-rise, or skyscraper depending on their height. Tall residential towers are a staple building type in all large cities. Their relative prominence in Canadian cities varies substantially, however. In general, more populated cities have more high-rises than smaller cities, due to a relative the scarcity of land and a greater demand for housing.

However, some cities such as Quebec City, and Halifax have fewer high-rise buildings due to several factors: a focus on historic preservation, height restrictions, and lower growth rates. In middle-sized cities with a relatively low population density, such as Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Hamilton, there are more apartment towers but they are greatly outnumbered by single-family houses. Most of the largest residential towers in Canada are found in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver—the country's most densely populated cities.

Toronto contains the second largest concentration of high-rise apartment buildings in North America (after New York). In Canada, like in other New World countries, but unlike Western Europe, most high-rise towers are located in the city centre (or "downtown"), where smaller, older buildings were demolished to make way in redevelopment schemes.

United States

432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential high-rise tower in the world, under construction in July 2014

In the United States tower blocks are commonly referred to as "midrise" or "highrise apartment buildings", depending on their height, while buildings that house fewer flats (apartments), or are not as tall as the tower blocks, are called "lowrise apartment buildings". Specifically, "midrise" buildings are as tall as the streets are wide, allowing 5 hours of sunlight on the street.

Some of the first residential towers were the Castle Village towers in Manhattan, New York City, completed in 1939. Their cross-shaped design was copied in towers in Parkchester and Stuyvesant Town residential developments.

The government's experiments in the 1960s and 70s to use high-rise apartments as a means of providing the housing solution for the poor broadly resulted in failure. Made in the tower in the park style, all but a few high-rise housing projects in the nation's largest cities, such as Cabrini–Green and Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Penn South in New York City and the Desire projects in New Orleans, fell victim to the "ghettofication" and are now being torn down, renovated, or replaced. Another example is the former Pruitt–Igoe complex in St. Louis, torn down in the 1970s.

In contrast to their public housing cousins, commercially developed high-rise apartment buildings continue to flourish in cities around the country largely due to high land prices and the housing boom of the 2000s. The Upper East Side in New York City and Chicago's Gold Coast, both featuring high-rise apartments, are the wealthiest urban neighborhoods in the United States.

Currently, the tallest residential building in the world is 432 Park Avenue located in New York City, United States of America, having a height of 1396 feet with the highest occupied floor at 1287 feet.

Australia

Housing commission towers in Waterloo, Sydney, Australia

High-rise living in Australia was limited to small pockets of bohemian inner Sydney until the 1960s, where a short-lived fashion saw public housing tenants located in new high-rise developments, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. The buildings pictured along with four other 16-story blocks were constructed on behalf of the Royal Australian Navy and were available to sailors and their families for accommodation. Due to social problems within these blocks the Navy left and the Department of Housing took charge and flats were let to low income and immigrant families. During the 1980s many people escaping communism in Eastern block countries were housed in these buildings. Developers have enthusiastically adopted the term "apartment" for these new high-rise blocks, perhaps to avoid the stigma still attached to housing commission flats.

Streets in the sky

"Streets in the sky" redirects here. For the third studio album by UK rock band The Enemy, see Streets in the Sky.

"Street in the sky" at Park Hill

Streets in the sky is a style of architecture that emerged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Generally built to replace run-down terraced housing, the new designs included not only modern improvements such as inside toilets, but also shops and other community facilities within high-rise blocks. Examples of the buildings and developments are Trellick Tower, Balfron Tower, Robin Hood Gardens and Keeling House in London, Hunslet Grange in Leeds and Park Hill, Sheffield. These were an attempt to develop a new architecture, differentiated from earlier large housing estates, such as Quarry Hill flats in Leeds. Alison and Peter Smithson were the architects of Robin Hood Gardens. Another large example, the Aylesbury Estate in South London, built in 1970, is about to be demolished. The Hulme Crescents in Manchester were the largest social housing scheme in Europe when built in 1972 but lasted just 22 years. The Crescents are recognised as one of the worst social housing schemes in British history, marred by design and practical problems; they severely challenged the viability of the Streets in the Sky ideal.

Deck access

Deck access is a type of flat that is accessed from a walkway that is open to the elements, as opposed to flats that are accessed from fully enclosed internal corridors. Deck access blocks of flats are usually fairly low-rise structures. The decks can vary from simple walkways, which may be covered or uncovered, to decks wide enough for small vehicles. The best known example of deck-access flats in the UK is Park Hill, Sheffield, where the decks are wide enough to allow electric vehicles; however, the design is inspired by French Modernist architect Le Corbusier, particularly his Unite D'Habitation in Marseilles.

Green tower blocks

Salford tower blocks in 2001. In the UK, tower blocks were mostly built between the 1950s and 70s.

Green tower blocks have some scheme of living plants or green roofs or solar panels on their roofs and/or incorporate other environmentally friendly design features.

See also

• Apartment Ratings
• Earthquake engineering
• Highrise (documentary), a project about life in high-rise apartments around the world
• Prefabrication
• Cutie de chibrituri – meaning Matchboxes in Romanian is the equivalent in Romania
• Wind engineering

References

Sources

• Aldrete, Gregory S. (2004). Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia. ISBN 978-0-313-33174-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dunleavy, Patrick (1981). The politics of mass housing in Britain, 1945–1975. Oxford, U.K: Clarendon Press. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hanley, Lynsey (2007). Estates: an intimate history. London: Granta Books. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Power, A. (1987). Property before people. London: Allen & Unwin. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Power, A. (1997). Estates on the edge. Great Britain: MacMillan. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)