Seth McDowell Architect, pllc

I believe that the city (or building) is not a ‘finished product’, but rather an endless process, with continuous transformations in every moment.

- Yona Friedman

Approximately 25% of existing urban buildings in the developed world are strong enough to carry additional floors made of wood. This project proposes to reevaluate Yona Friedman’s concepts and sketches for an adaptive city that is constructed above an existing city—Ville Spatiale—and investigate how trends in mass timber construction can act to facilitate concepts of adaptability, space-frame construction, and lightness—prompting practical methods for extending a city’s existing building fabric vertically.  

Yona Friedman’s writings and drawings of Ville Spatiale (The Spatial City), first proposed in 1956, expressed his concerns with the unchecked growth of the contemporary city and the inflexibility of urban environments in which buildings could not be easily altered to accommodate abrupt change. For over 50 years now, Friedman has been searching for an architecture of adaptation. His responses propose space-frames to be built over existing cities in which all components of the dwelling units (walls, ceilings, even water and power supply) could be changed easily or adapted to accommodate new requirements.  In contrast to many of his contemporaries at the time, Friedman and his collective Groupe d’études de architecture mobile (GEAM) wished to preserve existing cities and build new, flexible additions fifteen to twenty meters above them.

The resulting design provides instructions for inhabiting the roofscape—a new ground for the world’s growing urban population. Housing the expanding urbanity is one of the most significant challenges facing humanity today. Too often proposed solutions show little regard for the existing framework of our cities, choosing instead to replace the old with new, at great environmental, social, and cultural cost. The challenge then, is not only to build new structures, but to build upon the existing fabric of our cities, knitting together old and new while adding density.  With this direction, architecture takes the format of an exquisite corpse, and buildings are not seen as fixed, complete products, but rather indeterminate structures that expand vertically.  

The project reveals the potential of mass timber construction as a solution for adapting existing buildings of concrete, steel or masonry with vertical additions. Engineered wood products allow designers to build taller structures that are much lighter than steel and concrete while still meeting strict criteria for fire resistance and seismic challenges. Pairing this emerging materiality of mass timber with Friedman’s space-frame precedent generates realistic, lightweight, flexible technical solutions for building heightening.  

Ville Spatial Revisited deploys a modular wood platform framing system to extend and revive the abandoned West Heating Plant in Washington DC. This flexible system for construction establishes a light, modular building on top of an abandoned National Landmark Building. The new construction will generate a minimum of 108 residential units to the thriving, expensive neighborhood of Georgetown. The shifting assembly logic produces a situation that allows each resident to have exterior space and a corner window. Intermediate floor levels provide work space for the inhabitants and serve as mechanical floors. The residential units fluctuate in length in order to provide a variety of domestic sizes and to maximize the exterior exposure. The building in made of 90% wood. Both the structural system and cladding systems incorporate engineered lumber products. The North facade is conceived as a thermal veil and is composed of multiple layers of polycarbonate cladding in order to maintain a lightness while accepting light.