ctbuh.org/papers

Title: New Metropolitan Living and the Skycraper in a European City

Author: Jan Klerks, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat

Subject: Urban Design

Keyword: Urban Design

Publication Date: 2005

Original Publication: CTBUH 2005 7th World Congress, New York

Paper Type: 1. Book chapter/Part chapter 2. Journal paper 3. Conference proceeding 4. Unpublished conference paper 5. Magazine article 6. Unpublished

© Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat / Jan Klerks Jan Klerks Dutch Council on Tall Buildings

Jan Klerks, originally from Rotterdam in The , is the executive secretary of the Dutch Council on Tall Buildings. This foundation aims to create network and knowledge among professionals involved in high-rise development and construction in The Netherlands by organizing conferences and study trips and publishing a high-rise-centered newsletter. In this position, Mr. Klerks has represented the foundation and its goals on numer- ous occasions by giving lectures and interviews and writing articles and columns in a variety of magazines. His personal focus is on high-rise living.

Mr. Klerks is also chairman of the Rotterdam Skyscraper Foundation which tries to create and embody local enthusiasm for the skyscraper by publishing books and representing skyscraper development on a local level. Recently plans for a Rotterdam Skyscraper Festival have been initiated, and the event is planned for 2007.

He also created and administers the SkyscraperCity.com Web site, the world’s largest Internet community

about skyscrapers, cities, architecture, and other urban-related issues.

○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ New Metropolitan Living and the Skycraper in a European City

A relatively small but definite percentage of the city population prefers a high-metropolitan life style, some- thing being expressed by modern skyscraper living. It’s only until recently that this niche market has started to take shape in Europe, but merely on an incidental basis and only in a few cities. The typical European urban context can only partly be used as an argument to explain that theories of urban density and the classical promise of the skyscraper do not seem to apply to the modern residential skyscraper in Europe.

This presentation will look at the historic and current European residential skyscraper developments as the embodiment of new metropolitan living. It will address related issues dealing with high-rise zoning, laws and regulation, the definition of urbanity, population typologies based on residential preferences, past and present inner city development, and especially the marketing and branding of metropolitan living, all within a European context. The main goal is to create awareness of the potential of modern metropolitan living in European cities.

Findings will be accompanied by examples and case studies in Frankfurt, Germany; London; and the Dutch cities of Rotterdam and . New Metropolitan Living and the Skyscraper in a European City

Jan Klerks Stichting Hoogbouw / Dutch Council on Tall Buildings Postbus 51102 3007 CG Rotterdam, The Netherlands 010 484 1119 [email protected] member CTBUH

Abstract Particularly in Europe, the skyscraper is not a typical shape in which metropolitan living comes. Even in cities with no characteristic historical background, skyscrapers are incidents. Rotterdam is an example of a city in which skyscraper living has been embraced as a modern way of shaping new housing markets and creating a modern image. As such, a skyscraper isn’t the result of existing urbanity, but it tries to appeal to the image of modern urbanity and as such, trying to recreate a modern version of it. This paper wants to show that there is a modest but certain market for skyscraper living in Europe and that with proper guidance and ambition, this market could be successfully developed into a new way of creating modern metropolitan living and shaping cityscape ambition in Europe. keywords: high-rise living, high-rise policy, urbanity, city branding

1 NEW METROPOLITAN LIVING IN EUROPE

The Dutch word for skyscraper is ‘wolkenkrabber’. Sadly it is hardly being used. I don’t think anyone has ever actually said it out loud that he or she ‘lives in a skyscraper’, or that someone is ‘fond of skyscrapers’. Some would say that’s because The Netherlands wouldn’t have them. At times the unofficial but magic looking number of 500 feet is being used as a threshold value weather a tall building is a skyscraper or not, and the current tallest just happens to be 498 feet. Off course height isn’t everything. Slenderness, architectural appearance, ambition, location, use and urban mass don’t seem to count when it comes to naming the different sizes and shapes in which high-rise comes.

Looking at the numbers one can say that Europe never has developed a taste for skyscraper living, and it’s only as of late that in some European cities, residential skyscrapers start to appear. At the moment Moscow leads the race with the 264 meter tall Triumph-Palace, followed by the Vorobiovy Gory Tower II (188 meter), Edelweiss (176 meter) and Aliye Parusa 2 (176 meter) all in the current top 100 of tallest residentials in the world. Other tall ones are not located in cities where you might expect them, such as the capital cities of London, , Madrid and Berlin. The Swedish province town of Malmö, home of Santiago Calatrava’s 190 meter tall Turning Torso or Twistscraper, is quite an unlikely place for one of Europe’s tallest. Neguri Gane (145 meter) in Benidorm, Spain and Westpoint (142 meters) in Tilburg, The Netherlands are other such examples that rank high up there.

One European city that actually seems to enjoy skyscrapers is Rotterdam, The Netherlands. (city population: 600,000, metro: 1.2 million). Rotterdam, above all known for its harbour, is one of the few European cities that have embraced the skyscraper as the building type to shape the city center. Finishing off the 152 meter tall Montevideo residential tower, a new highlight is being added to the expanding ‘American’ skyline. At this moment, Rotterdam has eight projects under development reaching 500 feet and up. Out of these, five are residential skyscrapers. Local government has zoning plans in which it’s stated that skyscrapers are wanted. The start of construction of skyscrapers is being celebrated in the yearly Construction Site Festival, finished towers will be cheered during the first Skyscraper Festival in 2006. Books about skyscrapers generally make it to the overall number one spot in local bookstores. The city is home of the Dutch Council on Tall Buildings. Thanks to high-rise, the city has obtained an established image of modernity and energy. But Rotterdam also accepted high-rise with open arms as a characteristic element of its appearance as a city of architecture.

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Even though the development of residential skyscrapers is a recent one, the local high-rise history is quite interesting. Apart from the churches, bell towers and other tall structures not nor primarily used for housing purposes, it all started in 1898 when the 43 meter tall ‘Witte Huis’ was built, at the time the tallest office building in Europe. Based on the experience of the first high-rise apartment project in The Netherlands, the Nirwana Flat in , architect Jan Duiker was the first who published a study on high-rise in 1930 in which he reasoned that by going up, space, fresh air and sunlight would be available to all. Compared to the often cramped and dirty 19th century cities, that was a promising statement. He also argued that high-rise could lead to economies of scale, offering luxuries such as a launderette and a childcare, although he also concluded that high-rise living probably wouldn’t be suitable for families with children. The first theory based experiments took shape in four flat buildings for working-class tenants that were built in the 1930’s by architect Willem van Tijen, of which the Bergpolderlflat got the credit of being the first flat apartment building in the world.

The obvious sounding reason to explain skyscrapers in the Rotterdam is the devastation of the city center in the beginning of World War II and the decision to reshape the whole city center structure according to modern principles of urban planning. As such, it is lacking an often cherished historical frame of reference by which new developments are bounded. In the early reconstruction years, a lot of attention was being given to the economical function of the city center, pretty much ignoring the residential function. Starting in the 1960’s, high-rise was massively being used to shape political ideals about social housing. It took shape in the form of flats, usually four to ten stories high, at quite a distance from the city center. The Germans have a word that grasps this truly European housing type; plattenbau. In the generation after the Second World War, countries throughout Europe built high-rise housing in the public sector as the

3 modern response to deal with housing shortage. As such, high-rise was an expression of the new Europe and especially in some Eastern European countries, that dream was kept alive a bit longer by the powers to be. Because of that, this building type is also referred to on popular web forums as ‘commieblocks’. In the mid 1970’s, people seemed to be fed up with this uniform and ‘unurban’ way of living.

It wasn’t until the 1980’s when the department of urban planning started to think about how high-rise could be used to revitalise the city center. At that time, high-rise had a bad reputation. It was believed it would lead to lower property values, created traffic congestion and parking problems, was associated to high crime rates, was generally considered being unattractive and meant for lower-income households. But since the 1980’s, the city center slowly became more then just a business district. City planners and politicians realised that a city center ought to be a though through mixture of cooperating functions, profiting from each others proximity.

High-Rise policy first came as a paragraph in the ‘Inner City Development Plan’, which was later formalised in a dedicated ‘High Rise Policy’ plan. Ever since, the creation of the skyline has been carefully planned. Since ground leases are being based on the volume that is being built upon it, the skyscraper is not the result of expensive ground, but it’s the skyscraper that makes the ground expensive. High-Rise Policy designates high-rise zones in the city and specifies where 'super high-rise', of 150 metres or more, is permitted but it also clearly states the ambition of skyscraper development, as in ground floor use, architecture and the effects of skyscrapers in the surrounding area. High-rise is a key element of the urban policy aiming at the densification of the city center and to create a new housing market that would appeal to new residents, aiming at the middle and upper class. The designation of specific areas in the city where high-rise was admissible meant that a degree of shortage of space in the city was created, creating an artificial pressure on ground use. By increasing the number of dwellings in the center, building more offices and providing recreational amenities, such as entertainment venues and shops, urbanity can be given a generous impulse.

Some of the tallest towers are now being built and developed on the Wilhelminapier, a peninsula in a former harbour area now called Kop van Zuid, across from the city center on the other side of the river ‘Nieuwe Maas’. Since the river has always been a classical boundary in between the city and the harbour of Rotterdam, it was generally believed that it would be impossible to extend the city center over the river when the first plans for urbanisation were presented, let alone that it would allow for high-urban looking developments. Due to the construction of the Erasmus Bridge, a spectacular looking design by Ben van Berkel, the appreciation of the spacious character and especially the ability to maintain a high level of ambition by the local governments for a stretched period of time, the transformation of the old docklands into urban area has been successful. The ‘metropolitan ambition’ paid off. Stimulated by the general increase of prosperity, a relative stronger increase of the house prices and the recovered attraction of urban living interest in skyscraper living increased.

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As much as the skyscraper is regarded as an embodiment of metropolitan living, modern residential skyscrapers like the ones in Rotterdam cannot be regarded as the natural result of high urbanism. In an article titled ‘Kill the Skyscraper’ Rem Koolhaas states that ‘the skyscraper is a bizarre typology. Almost perfect at its invention the skyscraper has become less interesting in inverse proportion to its success. It has not been refined, but corrupted; the promise it once held – an organizing of excessive difference, the installation of surprise as a guiding principle – has been negated by repetitive banality. The intensification of density it initial delivered has been replaced by carefully spaced isolation’. In other words, you don’t really need the skyscraper these days. You’re indeed not going to save significant portions of rural or green space by building skyscrapers. But it also doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to want them.

It is indeed no longer a necessity to live in the city center, in which it can be argued that the city is a classic expression of the human expectation to profit from a fixed point of concentration of structures and people and hence wants, needs and goods. In the days that European cities took shape they were bounded by walls and canals, creating pressure on space within. Also the development of mass transportation and infrastructure gave new dimensions to space and time and hence the way it shaped the cities. Although the gathering of social-economic and physical structures is still an important condition for ‘being urban’, the different types in which urbanism comes (as in urban by quantity, image, theory or events) no longer needs to coincide in one and the same place. Urbanity can be everywhere.

Yet there is a certain demand for dense urban space. It stimulates economical, scientific and artistic production and it allows for physical networking. A recent study of housing preferences in the Rotterdam region showed that approximately seven percent of the population prefers metropolitan living but also that the bulk of the people interviewed want more space to live in, less bricks and less tall. From this, the local

5 newspaper concluded that skyscraper living was not popular, but seven percent of 600.000 people are still 42.000 people, while today the city center only populates 30.000. But that’s off course not all about skyscrapers. By size skyscrapers are also more prominently visible in the urban landscape compared to their part in the total housing market, still only representing very small percentages.

So far none of the discussed types of high-rise housing have anything to do with the classical concept of the skyscraper. As such, Manhattan can be regarded as the cradle and archetype for high-class metropolitan living. Particularly in the so-called eclectic period between 1870 and 1930 a number of cathedral size buildings in post Renaissance style were erected. The reason to pile up the residential palaces was simply shortage of space. In these massive buildings, sometimes looking like European castles and country houses, rich families often had a whole floor to themselves, complete with special sections for clerks and maids. Also today modern Manhattan lofts are still archetypes of metropolitan living. A recent addition to the New York skyline is the 269 meters high Trump World Tower, one of the tallest residential towers in the world.

This classic appeal of metropolitan living and the concept in which it takes shape contributes to the popularity of current residential skyscraper projects. The most important reason for people to choose for high-rise living is the view, followed by the characteristics of the location of the tower, preferably on top of typical city center functions such as shops, restaurants and public transport, or close to parks or the water. Duiker’s assumption that skyscrapers offer incentives for shared amenities still holds, but these days it offers a swimming pool, sauna and a fitness room. The only real common denominator amongst the inhabitants is that mostly we are dealing with households with no children, suggesting that the skyscraper doesn’t offer the kind of space these are looking for. People of all age groups are represented, but older people preferred the lower floors to the upper ones. It has never been investigated but it is suspected that a relative high percentage of the households in skyscrapers are gay couples, presumably because the gay population feels more attracted to urban areas compared to the tradition family. And off course, all people living in skyscrapers are able to afford it. Today a typical apartment in any typical skyscraper development in Rotterdam would be around 100 and 150 m2, costing in between € 250.000 and € 500.000, topping out to several millions for the penthouse.

Recently the marketing of luxury skyscraper living has started to take shape. Advertisements appeal to the idea of urban living, emphasizing on freedom of space and choice. ‘Urban Living’ has become a sales argument. ING Real Estate, the developer of the Montevideo tower introduced the concept of ‘Optimal Living’ which gives buyers a lot of options when it comes to arranging the floor plan of the apartment. It also comes with services like distant shopping, dry cleaning and features for safety, comfort en ICT. Only recently ING registrated ‘Metropolitan Living’ as a trade mark, apparently no one had already done so.

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The Rotterdam Housing Vision stipulates further residential development of the city center, particularly in the middle and upper class. As a typical working class city, Rotterdam lacks high class residential areas. The local government tries to create a suitable living environment to draw these particular income groups to Rotterdam. But there are other groups one can think of that would fit in a high urban environment; freshly graduated students, young families, career-specific working couple and old inhabitants of Rotterdam that want return to the city. The consequence of the chosen policy is that some of the urbanites are being excluded from the urban housing market, especially the younger ones. Instead of housing cists, people up to 25 years rather spend their money on events. This group is being referred as ‘the internet generation’, a group that doesn’t seek a stable, wide environment and has become footloose thanks to mobile telephony and Internet. This group, which considers the city as an extension of their living area, is likely to make much use of urban space isn’t the focus group of project developers and are only being served by student housing corporations.

Skyscrapers are not the only ‘out of the ordinary’ structures that shape urban housing in Rotterdam. The local government has been stimulating the option to buy a piece of land and privately built your own house. It’s also subsidising studies to built rooftop structures and real penthouses on top of existing office buildings or flat buildings. Although progress has been a bit slow and people seem to be reluctant to invest a lot of time and money in building a home on their own, more important then bringing in the numbers these developments are contributing to the image that city offers many new ways to shape anyone’s idea of living in the city center.

The importance of skyscrapers for the city is not only to create urbanity as positive congestion, but also urbanity as appearance. Residential skyscrapers aren’t there to draw the numbers, but especially designated groups within the crowd by creating urban soil through artificial scarcity. Residential skyscrapers in Rotterdam aren’t primarily the result of an exiting urbanity or the lack of a historical frame of reference, but more because of lacking middle- and higher incomes and an outdated image of in industrial city. The skyline didn’t grow by accident, but by design. This resulted in a new urban image which gave the city a metropolitan look and shows that skyscrapers may not be necessity, though proper guidance and ambition, the market for modern metropolitan living and shaping cityscape ambition could be successfully developed by using skyscrapers.

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References

Dijkstra, R. et.al., 2002 KWALITEITEN VAN STEDELIJKHEID, DRIE ESSAYS

Maandag, B., 2000 ROTTERDAM HOOGBOUWSTAD

Kollhaas, R., 2004 CONTENT

Melet, E. and Vreedenburgh, E., 2005 ROOFTOP ARCHITECTURE: Building On An Elevated Surface

Gemeente Rotterdam, et.al., 2004 DE GROTE WOONTEST

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