6 Tower Houses Boost to Today's Tastes
Although most of us are lucky to not need to reside in fortified houses today, there’s some thing about tower homes that continue to capture our imagination. We often think of towers too dark, foreboding places where water always seeps through the cold stone walls, chilling us to the bones. Or places where our eyes have been permanently dilated because of the dim light permeating miniature windows. But many architects today are successfully reinterpreting tower homes for contemporary life.
Benjamin Waechter
The substances used in building are now no longer restricted to stone (as in these previous towers) and its structural limitations. The use of steel frame, timber frame and concrete has made myriad structural alternatives. The choices allow for more flexibility in spatial planning, with virtually unlimited options for window openings, decks, roof terraces and staircases. They also allow for more options with outside finishes, which can include wood siding, plywood sheeting, sheet metal, composite board methods, plaster or exposed aggregate concrete.
The Tower House in Portland, Oregon, is an unadorned, modernist, metal-clad tower placed on a steep hillside and connected back to the property by means of a steel bridge. Its finish “provides the appearance of something ribbed, like a sweater,” says architect Benjamin Waechter. “It seems just like a garment”
Benjamin Waechter
“The Tower House has a solid concept in a way that it really could be thought of as three rooms and a building skin,” Waechter states. “The reason for doing this is to make a hierarchy involving the key rooms and these support spaces”
A living space is at the top, the dining area and kitchen are in the center, and the main bedroom is below.
Prentiss Balance Wickline Architects
The character of a tower raises practical issues to be dealt with at the design phase. Tower homes invariably need rigorous spatial preparation and difficult choices.
For example, tower dwellers might need to forgo some ancillary spaces or manage with smaller spaces. The practicality of vertical flow between flooring is another issue and typically confines most towers to three stories. How many men and women desire to spend their days running up and down tight staircases? Obtaining the building at a middle level can alleviate this potential issue.
Balance Associates constructed the Glenn Lake Tower, shown here, on a wooded hilltop over a lake in Michigan. Two metal clad walls encourage a three-story plywood box suspended over the ground.
Prentiss Balance Wickline Architects
The primary living spaces stand over the dense surrounding forests to acquire light, views and air.
marte.marte architects
Managing tighter spaces in a tower is more than compensated by the breathtaking views a few tower dwellers enjoy. This small, unpainted concrete tower in Austria, by Marte Marte Architects, sits delightfully onto a steep, sloping hillside. Accessed via a pathway along with a brief flight of steps, it’s truly an object in the landscape, unencumbered with outbuildings or car parking.
marte.marte architects
“Semantically speaking, this gesture of this tower creates archetypes of fortified structures and abstract computer figures in your mind’s eye, which makes the tower look familiar and strange at the same time,” the architect says.
marte.marte architects
In the entry level, an open patio inside the building footprint provides a panoramic view.
marte.marte architects
Oak-lined dividers create framed landscape paintings inside.
Uni structure
Tower homes are not all confined to isolated rural landscapes. Following is a exceptional tower home — XS House, by uni structure — that is composed of three stacked and rotated plywood boxes. The home is in a crowded suburban scheme and therefore was designed to deal with the need for solitude and for light.
Uni structure
Despite the lack of big windows, the interior this is brightly lit by the single door and the corner roof light.
Uni structure
Four corner skylights draw natural light into the home, provide skyward views and preserve privacy.
Edward Ogosta Architecture
This is not quite a tower home per se, but rather a home made up of four towers. Instead of being proposed based on some national functional program, the building was designed foremost as an instrument for intensifying a number of onsite phenomena.
Edward Ogosta Architecture
Edward Ogosta Architecture
It was designed by Edward Ogosta Architecture in Coachella, California, as a weekend home. The four sleeping towers have been oriented toward four “spatio-temporal viewing experiences”: the morning sunrise to the east, a mountain range to the south, day city lights to the west along with nighttime stars overhead.
Axis Mundi
This is actually the Vertical House, by Axis Mundi. The entrance is via a long and dramatic bridge into a viewing platform, where one ascends a staircase into the home. The dining and kitchen areas are on the first degree, the living room is on the next, and the main bedroom is over.
Axis Mundi
The builder states that the “Vertical House presents urban living on a rural site. The notion of a townhouse transposed into the country provides a exceptional solution to some challenging topology, and affords spectacular views of the surrounding countryside”
More: Old tower homes adapted for contemporary living