The dream of multiplying the zero level. Opportunity or shelter

Abstract

The vertical construction has always faced as one of its greatest challenges the relationship with the ground and the interest in moving it beyond the ground level of the city. At a time when overcrowded cities need to be built vertically on a massive scale and with great density, it is appropriate to rescue a series of projects that imagined ways of reproducing the most public and social level of the city in the heights, imitating its spatial and environmental conditions. Megastructures that dreamed of literally bringing the street and the square closer to the clouds, producing elevations of urban strata several meters from the mass of the Earth to create a multi-ground zero city. This article will review some architectural actions that, grouped under three project strategies, sought the radical multiplication of the zero level by raising the social and the relational in raised trays far from the ground level. Some aerial landforms that can be understood as places of opportunity to humanize the vertical city, or as spaces of refuge and disconnection from a congested city. The three strategies analyzed in the text will be the shelving of villas as an architectural support, the location of semi-open lungs such as squares or parks distributed in height and fragments of cities uprooted from the earths crust and elevated to hundreds of meters.