Lolux: Hybrid Density

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between low-income and luxury housing and proposes a building complex of hybrid density for the megacity. It simultaneously focuses on the two primary growth markets of New York City real estate—luxury condominiums and low-income apartments—and systematically works out areas of synergy between these disparate segments. The chapter addresses socio-economic issues in urban housing and how they relate to the architectural mandate. It acknowledges that architecture alone cannot solve systemic inequity, but it assumes agency for the design disciplines in these matters. The chapter insists that architecture provides cultural content, creates spatial, material, and aesthetic value, and thus holds the potential for improving human coexistence and the urban condition. The project’s search for new forms of densification is driven as much by the urgent need to create affordable and resilient space for habitation, as by the desire for density itself.