This was a student project by John Fleming, Simon Beskitt, and Jake Pfahl for Andrew Cruse and Bart Overly's course ARCH 7410 in Autumn 2017. Brooklyn Climate Tower Resort The tower, spiraling 2,000 feet skyward, transitions from urban living to wilderness camping. A typical pencil tower layout is slowly dissolved through the introduction of large-scale indoor landscapes as the tower rises. Each environment becomes a new ground plane as detached glass elevators deposit inhabitants directly into a new world with a unique climate, vegetation, and use. High-rise apartments with interior corridor access become ‘free-standing’ condominiums with access through the environments. The subversion of the tower culminates in vertical campgrounds surrounding a core of transient units. A continuous double-skin façade separates the tower interior from the city. During the day, the tower appears as a single, reflective object with subtle variation of frit density hinting at the duality of the interior. At night, the interlocked urban and wilderness conditions are revealed as interior lighting illuminates differences in scale, color, and materiality. Vertical Real(i)ty offers a new model of collective urban lifestyle, questioning ideas of shelter, ownership, and the urban condition. It is a tower in the city and a city in a tower. It is a resort in NYC and a resort in the rainforest, the tundra, the forest, the desert, and the beach. It is a resort for New York City through its inversion of the city.
