SlowTower

Abstract

We step in, face the door, and wait in awkward silence - that is our typical experience of moving between floors. Elevators, the very invention that enabled the vertical city, now function as little more than vertical teleportation between isolated floors, a brief utilitarian void buried deep inside the core. Unlike the past, where buildings were organized through a clear vertical hierarchy, the towers of today grow taller than ever, but in doing so have flattened the relationships between floors. What happens on the 8th floor is the same as on the 58th. Vertical movement has become non-sequential, non-hierarchical, and largely isolated. How can the elevator, our primary means of vertical circulation and an irreplaceable element of the tower, be reimagined to produce sequence, connection, and experience? SlowTower takes 11 Madison Avenue, an Art Deco skyscraper originally conceived as a 100-story tower but completed at 30 floors, as a site to reframe vertical circulation. By extending the existing surplus of shafts and structure, it adds a tower with a single extra-large elevator as a continuous inhabitable organ. Its speed, scale, form, and program are configured to unify disparate spaces and orchestrate sequential encounters across multiple floors. It embraces waiting and anticipation, generating brief, ephemeral moments of intensity.