OFFICE 9

‘Fear of the City’ was the theme of a research project responding to the anxiety created by the infiltration of technology into the public realm of Rotterdam in the early 2000s. But rather than dealing with the obvious issue of surveillance and its erosion of privacy, the project focused on a particular urban impulse. Heavily bombarded during the Second World War, Rotterdam underwent an extensive reconstruction that has given it a skyline composed almost entirely of towers, and outwardly resembling a metropolis. A closer look, however, reveals a suburban pattern of living, with an accumulation of objects rather than spaces. Embracing the idea that the only way to build Rotterdam is to build more towers, the project investigates their potential to give form to public space. Two projects illustrate the extremes of this thesis. The first presents a pair of towers – de facto stacks of suburban houses – that frame a square. The precise rhythm and proportions of these towers develop out of their system of columns and their cruciform cores, which enclose car elevators that rise up through the middle of identical sets of rooms. The second project is a single hollow tower encircled by a double-helix staircase and placed over an existing square containing Ossip Zadkine’s monument to the destroyed city. Like a monument for the new city, the square exists only as a tower.