Press Releases
What If Buildings Were Neighborhoods?
The mixed-use tower represents a compelling opportunity to scale urban intelligence inward to create buildings that function less like stacked floor plates and more like self-sufficient communities.
by Luc Wilson, Global Director of Design Technology
At the urban scale, KPF uses demand modeling to calibrate neighborhoods, analyzing how populations of office workers, residents, and hotel guests generate specific needs for amenities such as retail, dining, entertainment, cultural spaces, and parks. These sophisticated models enable design teams to translate a development’s core programmatic requirements, x square feet of office space, y number of apartments, or z amount of hotel rooms into an environment that feels alive rather than assembled by provisioning it with multiple scales of retail, public outdoor spaces, and entertainment options.
But this logic is almost never applied vertically.
In a single-use tower, occupants travel outward to access amenities distributed across the surrounding neighborhood dispersing activity and leaving the building inert outside of peak hours.
When a mixed-use tower internalizes those amenities, the building becomes self-sufficient—sustaining its occupants, activating its floors throughout the day, and strengthening its relationship to its urban context.
Mixed-use towers bring large numbers of people together under one roof and often have user groups that resemble nothing so much as small neighborhoods, yet each use in a tower is programmed independently, with its amenity demand offloaded to the surrounding neighborhood. What would vertical mixed-use look like if we extended that urban intelligence inward? Starting from a building’s square footage by use, we can model the amenity demand its occupants will generate and calibrate the program accordingly: How much food and beverage, fitness, retail, green space, and cultural programming would a given building need to sustain itself? Bringing amenities into the mixed-use building opens the door to novel and exciting juxtapositions. Imagine, for example, a screening room on the 30th floor of a new tower because the building’s 1,200 residents and 3,000 office workers generate enough demand for entertainment to justify it.
Applying urban intelligence to mixed-use towers could unlock projects that function less like stacked floor plates with each function operating independently and more like self-sufficient micro-neighborhoods. As formerly single-use business districts evolve into more mixed-use central social districts, how could a new generation of towers informed by this type of vertical urbanism catalyze vibrancy beyond the ground plane?
Lotte World Tower includes a transit center, parking facility, public square, lakeside park, generous indoor public spaces, shops, aquarium, movie theaters, concert hall, food and beverage, healthcare, roof gardens, conference spaces, office space, hotel, residences, and an observation deck.
Reimagining the tower as a vertical city requires structural and formal innovation, and creates new possibilities for special experiences, such as the Lotte World Tower’s hotel sky lobby.
At the ground level, the Lotte World Tower connects to a shopping, cultural, and entertainment center, further expanding the tower’s offerings and cementing the development as a destination for all of Seoul.
