A Brief History of Early Hyper Tower

Fig.2 A brief history of early hyper towers (MVRDV, 2005)

Hyper Tower

A brief history of early hyper towers
A long history of architects’ practice for building an ideal city within one gigantic high rise structure, eventually leads to the appearance of the Hyper Tower. The history could be backtracked to the early 20th century, when Theodore Garrett advocated for “A mammoth structure, towering into the clouds and containing within its walls the cultural, commercial and industrial activities of a great city.” (Rem Koolhaas, 1978) After that, inspired by the prosperity of American skyscrapers, architects from different countries continually brought their similar or relevant proposals in the whole century. Finally, disregarding the place where the proposals are developed, they gradually improved into the conception of a hyper tower.

Three main types of early hyper towers
According to the chronology, three types of early hyper towers can be clarified. The first one was a single tower with various functional space vertically distributed. This was the primary type of hyper tower. The shortcoming of this tower is that when the enlargement in height and scale is needed, the traffic between different function zones becomes too heavy to be solvable. Hence when the height reached 1,000 meters or the accommodation exceeded 50,000 people, it would meet its application limits. The second one was a structure of pyramid. Opposite to the first one, it is an utmost stable structure. Theoretically this structure of pyramid could be infinitely enlarged without changing the shape, as elements could be added to each of its four surfaces symmetrically. This process of enlargement would form a series of concentric layers where different functions would be distributed on, which brings a conception of function layer. However pyramid occupies immense base area corresponding to its height, therefore, its scale would be confined by the terrain conditions. Later, appeared in the end of 20th century, inter-connected towers beaten the previous two types of tower with the highest density and complexity. Horizontal distribution of different function towers and the vertical function division in each tower coexist here, giving birth to a three dimensional city.