APARTMENT BUILDINGS CAN BE TRICKY to review. More often than not, they reflect a pre-determined planning and development logic and are simply skinned from a selection of compliant cladding types. This shouldn’t be the case. Apartment buildings can provide great source material in the search for denser models of living, while interrogating the profoundly different ways they are presented through architectural and real-estate media. On one hand, architectural details command the whole frame while, through other channels, the architecture is barely there at all – apartment living presented to prospective purchasers as little more than a frame for the view.
Beyond the myriad ways that apartment buildings are presented to their various audiences is a search for a core idea that could be taken up by others and proliferate. Aldo Rossi has described the ideal of “an urban artefact… that continues to evolve with the life of the city through constant alteration and accommodation while retaining its irreducible structure”.1 The most enduring apartment buildings, then, are the ones that evolve the typical approach of an urban artefact that is relentlessly typical.
The recently completed Edition apartments are one such urban artefact that
