VERTICAL VILLAGE

TU DELFT

Master’s programme

Studio leads:
Winy Maas, Alexander Sverdlov

Cities in Asia are undergoing rapid change. Traditional urban villages, which formed the core of the cities for centuries, are being replaced at a merciless pace by uniform tower blocks. In tracking the development of nine very distinct Asian cities, this research provided insights into the evolution, current situation, and gradual decline of urban villages. Based on this research, students worked on the concepts for the new vertical villages which would retain some of the characteristics of the original, now disappearing settlements.

The Vertical Village is a vision of a bottom-up residential development, which evolutionary grows and changes over time.
It aims to combine the freedom of suburban architecture and the social coherence of village life with the density of the city.

The first stage of project was developed in a series of research endeavours, design studios and workshops in Delft, Rotterdam, Taipei and Taichung. It led to the publication “The Vertical Village” and the exhibition under the same name, which was on show at the Chung Shan Creative Hub, in Taipei, Taiwan .

TU Delft studio tutored by Alexander Sverdlov resulted into a design exploration of the new patterns of habitation in a high-rise dwelling which is being constructed out of individual and unique living cells. Students worked with large-scale models, the creation of which has been video-documented and has become a basis for the short movie and a publication.