The final frontiers of the vertical city

Now in its tenth edition, the "Tall Buildings" conference, promoted by Guamari, is an international reference point for all those who want to explore the new frontiers of tall building design, in Italy and beyond. The event, coordinated by Prof. Aldo Norsa, is patronised by the CTBUH of Chicago, the IUAV University of Venice and the Milan Polytechnic. Given the exceptional circumstances we are experiencing – the Coronavirus in Italy has blocked conferences, exhibitions and fairs of all kinds – the meeting has been postponed to spring 2021. However, the organisation decided to leave a trace with a digital, "approaching" seminar with the participation of some of the world's most recognised architects, including Mario Cucinella (MC A), Elizabeth de Portzamparc (2 Portzamparc), Mina Hasman (SOM), Andreas Kipar (LAND), Inès Lamunière (dl-a), Michele Rossi (Park), Patricia Viel (ACPV).

The video presented on 6 November has as its common thread the relationship between urban morphology and high building typology in the new cities that we want to design for the post-pandemic era. New generation buildings must be designed with a holistic approach, taking into account not only compositional and technological aspects but also social and anthropological ones. The video explores various issues that affect both the world of work and the world of consumption and lead to changes in aspects of the economy that will inevitably have an impact on residential construction.

"Building on high is a challenge that humanity has taken up since the time of the Tower of Babel, and which brings cosmopolitanism, encounter, dialogue, coexistence, at a time when locking oneself in one's own rooms and becoming enslaved by the internet leads to forms of intolerance, obscurantism and a decadent tendency," explains Norsa in the introduction to the conference.

Mario Cucinella recounts the approach of his studio MC A, which with architecture seeks a delicate balance between social coexistence and respect for the environment. The architect focuses on his latest project, the UnipolSai Group Headquarters, a tower whose construction should be completed in 2021 in Milan, and which sums up the principles of hybridisation and sustainability of MC A studio. The intervention by Elizabeth De Portzamparc, from studio 2 Portzamparc, links perfectly with the topics addressed by Cucinella. The architect and sociologist, always sensitive to the multidisciplinary aspects of design, recounts the studio's philosophy and in particular the Fourth Generation Tower, under construction in Taiwan, conceived as a set of small urban neighbourhoods with many internal streets and squares that function as meeting places to create social ties, and to facilitate the encounter between man and nature. The reflections of Patricia Viel, from ACPV, concern the responsibility of architects and urban planners in complex urban contexts such as Milan. Hers is an analysis of how the collective conscience is behaving in the face of the numerous vertical development interventions that have been carried out over the last ten years.