More Study Needed on Social Impacts Of Sealed Vertical Cities
Arthur Gensler, the architect of Shanghai Tower, on its way up to 632 meters, refers to the 5.5-million-sq-ft supertower as a vertical city. The tower is designed as a series of stacked, 14-story communities, separated by podiums, or town squares, filled with coffee shops and other amenities. Taken to a greater extreme, a vertical city’s hamlets could have doctors’ offices, schools, clothing shops, movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, cobblers, a post office, bookstores and more.
The idea is to mass each supertall building into discrete blocks of occupancies, whether office, hotel or housing, with each block virtually self-sufficient. The elevator becomes the subway. In combination with retail, services and recreational facilities at the podium levels, one might never have to leave the building. Life is lived in a bubble.