Page 36 - Vertical City

36 The vertical city

ting congested concentric mega-networks of exorbitant
costs.

After the Second World War and in temperate
zones, the massive construction of high and wide blocks
of housing was organized following the L/H rule . 19 The
buildings were thus spaced further apart according to
their height (L/H superior to 1 for those of 12 meters
depth with north-south facades, L/H superior to 2
for 18 meters depth with east-west facades), leaving
between them large spaces difficult to use and subject
to unpleasant air drafts.

The isolated wide and high building blocks, such as
Brusilia or La Magnanerie in Brussels could thus only
be conceived in vast parks, which occupied too much
ground space.

In our latitudes, groupings of wide and high building
blocks have proved inappropriate and their construc-
tion has been abandoned since the end of the 1960s.

High-rise construction in our cities can therefore
only take the form of towers (those of which the plan
is comprised between a B × B square and a B × 2B rec-
tangle), to limit the prejudice of their projected shadow
and the air currents at their base. The L/H rule alone
has become inoperative.

This is not the case in tropical zones where the tra-
jectory of the sun from east to west hardly deviates
from the vertical.

19 It has already been noted that rows of habitations organized on a
hexagonal plan enable a net density superior to those organized on
rectangular plan [figure 8, illustration IV].