An interesting Studio Project program was introduced for the spring semester 2011 at University of Applied Arts Vienna, titled-Vertical Mass, Neither One nor Many. The idea was to propose large scale urban developments as an alternative to a collection of towers resting on a retail and public plinth.  The designs would have to reinterpret notions of skyline voids and spaces within masses, putting the emphasis on the urban void instead of a tower of any kind.

Designed by Joseph Hofmarcher, Rangel Karaivanov, Jürgen Strohmayer and Siim Tuksam, the Levent Vertical Mass sits at a high point of the Bosphorus Valley, integrating the high velocity axes of the highways and contextualizing views of the old city towards the southwest. The building is a commercial high-rise facilitating hotels, offices, condominiums and public plazas and gardens. The vertical garden occupies one of the landed masses and spills into the plaza meeting semi-programmed surfaces (open air theatres, parks) triggered by the civic program in the two other masses that touch the ground. The structure is made of a torus-shaped voids and supple forms, with the adjacent program and circulation pulled around the torus into the central mixed space. Multiplicity is created by organizing program and surfaces into irreducible forms negotiating organic internal logics with the urban concept of the project.