Daniel sent us this one, and it gets at something I think a lot of people feel but don't quite have the words for. He's fascinated by high-rise living — not just the view or the status, but the idea of a building as a self-contained world. A place where you could go days without needing to leave, where the gym and the grocery and your friends are all within the same structure, not because you're a hermit but because the convenience of it is genuinely appealing. But here's the tension he's pointing at: most high-rises actually produce the opposite of that. You end up with hundreds of individual worlds stacked on top of each other, and the only shared space is an elevator car where nobody talks. So his question is, how have architects actually tried to solve this? What designs let a genuine community emerge organically inside a vertical building?
This is one of those problems where the numbers make the failure unmistakable. You can have a thousand people living in a single tower, and the only infrastructure they share is a metal box that moves between floors. That's not a community, that's a filing cabinet for humans.
Filing cabinet for humans is grim. Accurate, but grim.
It's what the design produces. And what makes this worth digging into is that it's not inevitable. We've known how to fix it for decades. The question is why we keep not doing it.
What exactly is going wrong in these vertical buildings that should be neighborhoods but end up feeling more like, as you said, storage units for people?
The core problem has a name in architecture — it's the elimination of what they call threshold spaces. These are the zones that sit between fully private and fully public. Think of a front porch on a suburban house. It's yours, but it faces the street. A neighbor walking by can stop and talk without being inside your home, and you're not out in the middle of a public plaza. It's a gradient. High-rises systematically destroy that gradient. You're either inside your apartment with the door locked, or you're in a lobby designed to move you through as fast as possible, or you're in an elevator where the social norm is to stare at the floor numbers.
The elevator face.
That's the term proxemics researchers use. The dead-eyed, slightly upward gaze people adopt in elevators. It's a coping mechanism for being in extreme proximity to strangers with no social script for interaction. The space is too small for the normal distance we keep from people we don't know, so we compensate by pretending the other person doesn't exist.
I've always found it fascinating that the universal rule of elevators is you face the door. Nobody faces the back wall. Nobody faces the other people. It's like we all silently agreed that the only acceptable thing to look at is the door we're about to escape through.
That's the only shared space in most high-rises. A room where the universal agreement is "let's pretend this isn't happening." So if your only social infrastructure actively suppresses social behavior, what do you expect the outcome to be?
Let's start by understanding how we got here. Because these design decisions aren't accidents. Something drove them.
And the main driver is what you might call the podium problem. In most modern high-rises, especially the ones built in the last thirty years, the ground floor is a dead zone. You walk in, there's a security desk, maybe a sleek lobby with a sculpture nobody looks at, and then the elevator bank. The entire design is optimized for one thing: moving people from the street to their apartment as efficiently as possible, while keeping everyone else out. The lobby isn't a commons, it's a checkpoint.
That's an economic choice, not a design necessity.
Every square foot of ground-floor space that isn't leasable retail or rentable residential is money the developer doesn't recoup. So you get the minimum lobby required by code, and everything else gets monetized. The result is a building that has no place to linger. You can't accidentally run into a neighbor because there's nowhere to be except in transit.
Which brings us to the second problem, and this one's less obvious: the amenities trap. You'd think putting a gym and a pool and a lounge in a building would create community. But the way they're typically arranged actually does the opposite.
This is one of the big misconceptions. More amenities don't automatically create more community. What they often create is what I'd call destination isolation. The gym is on floor three, the pool is on floor five, the lounge is on floor twenty. Each one is a specialized destination. You go to the gym to work out, not to socialize. You go to the lounge when you've booked it for a specific event. These aren't spaces you pass through on your way to somewhere else, which means they don't create the kind of accidental encounters that actually build relationships.
The suburban front porch works because you're already there. You're sitting on it because it's your porch, and a neighbor walks by. The interaction isn't scheduled. It's a byproduct of the design. A gym on floor three requires you to decide to go to the gym, and when you get there, everyone has headphones on.
There's research backing this up. The strongest predictor of whether neighbors become friends isn't shared interests or similar demographics. It's what researchers call "passive contact" — the number of times you cross paths with someone in the course of your daily routines. The architecture either enables that or prevents it.
The missing piece in most high-rises is what you'd call the middle ground. The suburban house has the porch and the front yard. The urban row house has the stoop. The high-rise has a hallway with numbered doors and an elevator. There's no architectural equivalent of the space where you're neither fully in public nor fully in private.
This isn't just a feeling. My own observation, from years of looking at this research, is that high-rise residents consistently report less connection to their neighbors and their broader neighborhood than people in low-rise buildings, even when you control for income and location. The building typology itself is doing something.
Let's talk about one of the earliest attempts to fix this, because it's instructive in both what it got right and why it failed. Marina City in Chicago, Bertrand Goldberg, nineteen sixty-four.
The corncob towers. Those two circular towers on the Chicago River. Goldberg's original vision was radical for the time. He designed communal spaces on every fifth floor — laundry rooms, small lounges, shared terraces. The idea was that instead of everyone going to the ground floor for everything, you'd have these vertical neighborhood nodes. You'd do your laundry on your floor cluster, and while you were there, you'd run into the people who lived four floors above or below you.
Then what happened?
Subsequent management converted them into additional apartments. More units, more rent. The community spaces disappeared because they looked like wasted square footage on a spreadsheet. And that's the recurring story. The economic pressure to maximize leasable area eats every space that isn't explicitly required or defended.
If the standard high-rise is designed for isolation, and even the ones that try to fix it get their community spaces cannibalized, what does the alternative actually look like? Are there buildings that got this right?
There are, and they teach us something important. The most instructive example might be Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, completed in nineteen fifty-two. It's a massive concrete block, eighteen floors, three hundred thirty-seven apartments. But the key innovation was something called the skip-stop elevator system. The elevators only stop at every third floor.
If you live on floor eight, you get off at floor nine and walk down one flight?
And that walk isn't just a walk. It's a shared interior street. The corridors on those intermediate floors are double-height, they're wide, and they're designed as social spaces. Because everyone on floors seven through nine has to use the same corridor to get to their apartments, you can't avoid crossing paths with your neighbors. The circulation system forces repeated encounters.
That's the opposite of the modern luxury tower where you swipe a fob and the elevator takes you directly to your private vestibule without you ever seeing another human being.
The skip-stop system introduces what you might call productive friction. It makes movement through the building slightly less efficient in exchange for making it significantly more social. And Le Corbusier didn't stop there. He put shops, a bakery, a hotel, and a rooftop nursery school in the building. The seventh and eighth floors were an internal shopping street. The roof was a community space with a running track and a shallow pool. The building was designed to be a vertical village.
Yet this approach didn't catch on.
A skip-stop system means the structural engineering is more complex. You need corridors that are wider and taller than code minimums. You're giving up leasable square footage. And developers, especially in the decades after the Unité was built, were optimizing for maximum return per square foot, not for community outcomes. The skip-stop was abandoned because it was more expensive to build and more expensive to maintain.
The market selected for isolation.
The market selected for what could be measured in a pro forma spreadsheet. And community doesn't show up on a pro forma.
Let's talk about Habitat sixty-seven in Montreal. Moshe Safdie, nineteen sixty-seven. This one looks like a pile of children's blocks.
Three hundred fifty-four prefabricated concrete boxes, stacked in a way that looks almost random but is actually meticulously engineered. Each unit has its own private garden on the roof of the unit below it. And the circulation isn't through internal corridors — it's through a network of pedestrian streets at multiple levels, open to the air. You walk to your apartment along what feels like a village street, not a hotel hallway.
The key difference there is that the path to your door is a social space, not just a transport space.
That's the distinction. In a standard high-rise, the corridor is a place you want to leave as quickly as possible. It's narrow, it's artificially lit, it smells like whatever your neighbor cooked for dinner. In Habitat, the "corridor" is a street in the sky. You might stop and talk to someone because it feels like a place where stopping and talking is normal.
Habitat sixty-seven was an experiment for Expo sixty-seven. It wasn't replicated at scale.
No, and it was never intended to be. It was a proof of concept. Safdie was trying to demonstrate that you could combine the density of apartment living with the spatial qualities of a suburban house — private outdoor space, a sense of territory, a gradual transition from public to private. The problem is that the construction method was expensive and the stacking geometry is incredibly complex to engineer. It's a masterpiece, but it's not a template.
We've got the Unité showing that forced circulation creates community, and Habitat showing that making the path to your door feel like a street changes behavior. What's the contemporary example that actually pulls this off at scale?
The Interlace in Singapore. Completed in twenty thirteen, designed by Ole Scheeren when he was at OMA. This is the one that really shows what's possible. It's thirty-one hexagonal blocks, each six stories tall, stacked in a hexagonal grid pattern. They're not vertical towers — they're horizontal bars stacked on top of each other at angles. The result is eight large courtyards and multiple sky gardens spread across one thousand forty apartments.
Instead of one tall tower, you've got a kind of woven structure where the spaces between the blocks become the community infrastructure.
And here's the crucial design move: the courtyards aren't optional amenities you have to seek out. They're the spaces you pass through to get anywhere. If you're walking from one block to another, you cross through a courtyard. If you're going to the ground level, you pass through shared gardens. The circulation system and the social spaces are the same thing. You can't avoid community without going out of your way to avoid it.
Which is the opposite of the standard tower, where you have to go out of your way to find community.
And the Interlace also integrates what planners call third places — cafes, grocery stores, community kitchens, daycares. But unlike the typical podium tower where retail is on the ground floor and residential starts above, the Interlace weaves these uses through the complex. You might pass the daycare on your way to the grocery, and the community kitchen is on an intermediate level where multiple blocks converge.
It's not just about putting stuff in the building. It's about where you put it and how people move past it.
Location is everything. A cafe on the ground floor of a forty-story tower will be used by people from the tower and maybe some street traffic. A cafe on the eighth floor, positioned where three residential corridors meet, becomes a neighborhood hub. You walk past it every day. You see the same people there. Eventually you become one of the people there.
Let's talk about Vancouver's Woodward's Building, because that one takes a different approach — it integrates the community spaces vertically rather than horizontally.
The Woodward's redevelopment is a really interesting case because it wasn't designed from scratch as a utopian experiment. It was a redevelopment of an old department store site in a neighborhood that had seen better days. The design put a daycare, a grocery store, community kitchens, and nonprofit office space on intermediate floors of the tower, not just at ground level. The idea was that these uses would draw people from different floors into shared spaces as part of their daily routines, not as special trips.
That's the difference between a destination and a routine. If the grocery store is on the ground floor, you go there, you come back, you never see your neighbors. If it's on floor twelve and you have to walk past the community kitchen to get there, you might stop and talk to whoever's cooking.
The design principle is what I'd call unavoidable shared space. Not mandatory socializing — nobody's forcing you to join a potluck. But the architecture makes it so that going about your daily life naturally brings you into contact with other people. You can still put your headphones on and ignore everyone. But you have to make an active choice to do so, rather than the building making that choice for you.
If we step back and look at these examples — the Unité, Habitat, the Interlace, Woodward's — what are the design principles that actually work?
I'd say there are three that show up consistently. The first is forced circulation paths that create repeated encounters. The skip-stop elevator, the shared corridors, the courtyards you have to cross. The second is third places at intermediate floors, not just at ground level or the penthouse. The shops, cafes, daycares, and community rooms that you pass through as part of your daily routine. And the third is shared spaces that are unavoidable rather than optional. Not a lounge you have to book, but a garden you walk through to get to your door.
The first two are design choices. The third one is almost a philosophy. It's saying that community happens in the spaces between destinations, not at the destinations themselves.
And it's the thing most developers don't understand. They think community is an amenity you can add to a building, like a pool or a concierge. But community isn't an amenity. It's an emergent property of a spatial layout that makes human contact easy and natural.
Why aren't these strategies more common? What's actually blocking them?
Every one of these design moves costs something. Skip-stop elevators mean more complex mechanical systems. Wide corridors mean less sellable square footage. Intermediate-floor retail means structural reinforcement and more complex fire safety systems. The Interlace cost significantly more to build than a conventional tower cluster on the same site would have.
The counterargument from a developer's perspective is, show me the return on that investment.
And that's where the conversation usually stalls, because community is hard to quantify. But there's actually a growing body of evidence that buildings with strong social infrastructure have measurable economic benefits. Lower tenant turnover, for one thing. If you know your neighbors and feel connected to your building, you're less likely to move. Higher rent premiums in some markets — people will pay more for a building that feels like a neighborhood. Better maintenance outcomes, because residents who feel ownership over shared spaces are more likely to report problems early and treat the building well.
The ROI exists, it's just not captured in the standard development pro forma. The developer who builds the building isn't necessarily the one who benefits from lower turnover ten years later.
That's the split incentive problem. And it's where policy starts to matter. Singapore has been ahead of the curve on this. They require communal sky gardens in new developments above twenty stories. It's written into the zoning code. Developers don't have a choice — if you're building tall, you're building community spaces. And because everyone has to do it, nobody loses a competitive advantage by doing it.
That's a fascinating nudge. If the market won't produce community on its own, make community a condition of building at all.
Singapore's approach is worth studying because it's not prescriptive about what the community space looks like. It just says you need X amount of communal space at Y intervals. Developers can be creative within that framework. Some do sky gardens, some do shared kitchens, some do rooftop farms. The regulation sets the floor, and the market competes on quality above that floor.
If you're a resident in a typical high-rise right now, and you're listening to this thinking, great, but I don't live in the Interlace and my building has a lobby that looks like a dentist's waiting room, what can you actually do?
There's more room for intervention than people think. Most high-rises have underutilized spaces that could be converted into informal gathering spots without major construction. The corner of a lobby that nobody sits in. A rooftop mechanical room with a bit of adjacent flat roof. A corridor alcove wide enough for a couple of chairs. The key is to start small and demonstrate demand.
You're not asking building management to build a sky garden. You're asking if you can put two chairs and a coffee table in a dead corner of the lobby and see what happens.
And when people start using it, you've got evidence that community infrastructure gets used. That changes the conversation with management from "we want you to spend money on something unproven" to "we've proven it works, now let's do more." I've seen buildings where a single bench in a sunny spot near the mailboxes became the nucleus of a resident community, simply because it gave people a reason to pause for thirty seconds instead of walking straight to the elevator.
The bench is the gateway drug of vertical community.
And from there, you can advocate for more. Convert an underused amenity room into a co-working space that's open by default rather than bookable. Push for a community bulletin board in the elevator lobby. Once management sees that residents want community and will use the spaces that enable it, the economic calculus starts to shift.
What about architects and developers who are designing new buildings? What should they be prioritizing?
The single biggest shift is to stop thinking of circulation as wasted space and start thinking of it as social infrastructure. Every square foot of corridor, stairwell, and lobby is an opportunity for encounter. If you design those spaces to be places people want to be, rather than places they want to leave, you've changed the entire social dynamic of the building. That means natural light in corridors. Materials that feel residential rather than institutional.
The corridor should feel like a room, not a tunnel.
That's the phrase. And the second shift is to distribute shared functions vertically rather than concentrating them on the ground floor. If the only shared spaces are at level one, the person on floor thirty has to make a special trip to use them. If there's a small shared space every five or six floors, it becomes part of their daily territory.
We've talked about what works, what blocks it, and what residents and developers can do. Let's zoom out. You mentioned earlier that the strongest predictor of neighbor friendships is passive contact — the number of times you cross paths. That's a design variable. But there's also a cultural variable. Not everyone wants to know their neighbors.
That's a crucial distinction. The goal isn't to force community on people who don't want it. The goal is to make community available to people who do want it, without requiring them to become social engineers to make it happen. The best designs create what I'd call opt-out community. The default is that you encounter people. You can still choose to be private — wear headphones, don't make eye contact, keep to yourself. But you have to actively opt out, rather than the building opting you out by default.
Which brings us back to Daniel's original prompt. He talked about wanting a building that feels like a self-contained world, where you could go days without leaving, not because you're a hermit but because everything you need is right there and the convenience is appealing. You're alone in a building full of people.
The filing cabinet problem again. You've got all the drawers, but they don't connect to each other. What Daniel's describing is a vertical village, and the difference between a filing cabinet and a village isn't the number of people or the number of amenities. It's the spaces between the private units. The streets, the squares, the front porches. A village works because you can't get from your house to the bakery without walking through shared space. A high-rise fails because you can get from your apartment to everywhere else without ever being in a space where lingering is possible or normal.
The question Daniel's really asking is, can you build a skyscraper that works like a village? And the answer from these examples seems to be yes, but only if you're willing to design for friction.
That's the paradox at the heart of this. We've spent a century optimizing buildings for efficiency — faster elevators, shorter corridors, direct access from parking to apartment. And every efficiency gain has made the buildings worse at producing community. The buildings that work socially are the ones that introduce deliberate inefficiencies. The skip-stop elevator that makes you walk. The courtyard you have to cross. The corridor wide enough to stop and talk.
That's a hard sell in a market where convenience is the primary selling point. But I think there's reason for optimism. The remote work shift means more people are spending more time in their buildings. The desire for local community is growing, not shrinking. And the examples we've discussed — the Interlace, Woodward's, even the Unité still functioning after seventy years — they show that when you build for community, people use it.
Let's land on something practical. If we had to boil this down to three design principles that actually work, what are they?
First, circulation as social space. The paths people take through the building should be places they want to be, not places they want to escape. Second, vertical distribution of shared functions. Don't put everything on the ground floor — spread shops, gardens, kitchens, and gathering spaces through the height of the building. Third, unavoidable shared space. Design so that daily routines naturally bring people into contact with each other. Not mandatory socializing, but architecture that makes encounter the default rather than the exception.
If you're a resident who can't rebuild your building, the principle is the same at smaller scale: find the dead spaces and give people a reason to pause in them.
A bench, a coffee table, a bulletin board. Community doesn't require a sky garden. It requires a place to stop.
As remote work keeps reshaping how we live, and more people spend more hours in their buildings, do you think the demand for communal high-rises is going to grow?
I think it has to. If you're working from home and your home is a sealed box in a tower of sealed boxes, that's a recipe for isolation that even the most introverted person will eventually feel. The buildings that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that give people a reason to leave their apartment without leaving their building. And that means designing for the spaces between.
The skyscraper as vertical village. Where the elevator is just one of many ways to move through a community, not the only one.
Where you might actually know the name of the person who lives three floors down.
A radical concept.
It shouldn't be.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen seventies, the lighthouse keeper at Cabo de Honduras earned the equivalent of two hundred sixty pounds of dried coconut per month, which converts to roughly one point three modern Peloton bikes per year at today's resale prices.
I have so many questions and I'm not sure I want any of them answered.
The coconut-to-Peloton exchange rate is not something I ever expected to encounter.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find the show. We'll be back soon with another one.
