Fifteen high-rise housing concepts and corresponding case studies are selected for their distinctive modes of “reproducing the world.” Raw plots are expanded, limited, and optimized; architectural manipulation mitigates the loss of profit implicit in zoning codes and envelope restrictions. Planimetric and sectional analyses of this phenomenon are used as tools for reverse engineering the case studies into datas, from which useful quantitative relationships are extracted, charted, and figured forth into a set of fifteen generic models. Reducing architecture to the mathematical figuration of a chart, and thereby eradicating the noise of style and design, reveals a logic of amplitudes, inflections, and frequency--a collection of fifteen typological samples, each containing unique singularities. Conceptualized as a kit of parts, the samples are strategically concatenated, linked through operative value relationships into a systemic cadavre exquis. Floor Area Ratio, plot size, and plot coverage are defined as parameters for expanding, contracting, and transforming a project that seeks to deposit its aggregate intelligence into the remaining plots left in the super-dense metropolis.

Returning to New York, the project identifies a range of through-block plots as stages for proliferating high-rise housing clusters. Instantiating this new logic upon nine prototypical Manhattan plots of incrementally increasing size, new high-rise housing proposals are produced. As the plot expands so to does the regime of complexity contained in the architectural body, producing within itself new and unexpected potentials for re-thinking the nature of ground, the housing it produces, and the resulting relationships between private (interior) and public (exterior) zones. Within the discourse of housing design, the project suspends repetition, modularity, and sameness as features of a typological status quo that limit the scope of housing’s theoretical ground and anchor possibilities to outmoded forms of Modernist production. Leaving behind de facto standards liberates the architect from the impulse to save the city one unit at a time, and calibrates our role within the urban environment to a more expansive context that exceeds architecture as a technocratic endeavor and leverages our capacity to practice critically. As problems surrounding housing design continue to conflate into conventional solutions--marginalizing the role of the architect into an iterative producer--the moment is appropriate to construct new grounds for the discussing the typology; to liberate the congestion surrounding the discourse into a culture of new productive principles.