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THE QUALITY OF URBAN DENSITY MACRO AND MICRO SCALE
Abstract
Searching for quality of density of the city eventually acts as an answer to the question about the possibility of improving its structure. Moreover, the goal for the contemporary city is to become gradually more and more competitive. Therefore, increasing polarization of urban structures in terms of the quality of life that they offer becomes domain of contemporaneity. At the same time, the process becomes a challenge for building visions of the future.The example of New York Manhattan shows the act of creating the city's quality by improving efficiency of the basic urban unit, namely an urban block. The paper presents a typology of objects that redefine public space and density of the city. Three distinctive examples of Manhattan block buildings created between 2011 and 2017 (2 completed and 1 conceptual design) were analyzed in terms of: provided functions, their layouts, quality of their architecture and the social spaces created inside the structures. The three presented edifices were: Via 57 West designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, Clinton Park designed by Ten Arquitectos and Block/Tower a design strategy for Midtown Manhattan of Stan Allen and Rafi Segal. The described objects exemplified the scale of efforts undertaken to obtain the highest building parameters. In each of the cases, their designers chose a different way of creating public and social spaces. This aspect in connection with proposed solutions for greenery may be presented as a particular definition of a new high-quality quarter. Methods of creating public space that were used in the buildings presented in the paper were considered to be a particularly interesting aspect. This issue becomes crucial in contemporary and future cities in the case of such large escalation of development, which in its pursuit "into the sky" seems to lose touch with the level of the city space.
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