High-Rise Towers and Their Relation to Context-Sensitive Design Elements in Architectural Education

Abstract

This paper studies modern towers’ architecture from a pedagogical point of view focusing on elements of towers’ impact on its surrounding context and its impact on architecture students’ understanding of high-rise building typology. The paper examines towers’ impact on the surrounding context if it is far greater than the contextual parameters that affect their architecture itself, regardless of the tower’s spatial program and functions. The research followed an analytical methodology to break down students’ projects within different locations in Egypt from the 6th semester design course in the Architecture and Urban Design program, German University in Cairo. The selected projects were done over a duration of 6 years (between 2013 and 2019). A series of comparative analysis were achieved by proposing a matrix that highlights the interrelations between the different types of towers and the contextual sensitive design parameters. The paper categorizes the projects according to their locations within new cities in Egypt, and these locations are New Cairo, New Capital and New Alamein City. All collected data and analysis are compiled through the proposed matrix of contextual sensitive design parameters based on three factors; architecture approach, street and Infrastructure, and public realm.