6 Tower Houses

Typology Study

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Six Tower Houses: Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined

The tower house is a specific architectural wager: that elevation — not sprawl — is the right answer to a difficult site. Rather than resolving the ground, it escapes it. A single column, a concrete pylon, a narrow shaft replaces the conventional plinth, and the house becomes a vertical section — every floor a distinct moment, every view hard-won. These six projects, spanning built works, unbuilt proposals, and at least one admitted fantasy, each make that wager differently.

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01 — Built

Chemosphere

John Lautner, 1960 — Hollywood Hills, CA

The defining example in the American tradition. A single 7-foot concrete column drives into a slope too steep for conventional construction — Lautner’s client, Leonard Malin, was told by other architects the site was unbuildable. The octagonal volume it supports reads as a pure object against the canyon, but the interior is anything but abstract: it turns continuously toward light and view. This is the building that makes the tower typology legible as architecture rather than engineering novelty.

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02 — Built

Keenan Tower House

Marlon Blackwell Architect, 2000 — Fayetteville, AR

Where Lautner’s Chemosphere sits on a column, Blackwell’s tower stands on the Arkansas landscape as a kind of vertical cabin — modest in material, precise in its stacking of sleeping, living, and outlook. The corrugated metal skin and minimal footprint make a clear argument: that the tower house isn’t only a solution to extreme topography. Sometimes it’s a choice about presence on flat ground.

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03 — Unbuilt

Naomi Campbell Residence

Zaha Hadid Architects, c. 2007 — Unbuilt

A concept that pushes the tower house into formal territory none of the built examples approach. Hadid’s proposal torques and cantilevers the volume as it rises, so the tower reads differently from every angle — less a house on a column than a continuous topological surface that happens to be habitable. Whether it would have performed as well as it renders is the perennial question with late Hadid work.

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04 — Built

Tower House

GLUCK+, 2012 — Upstate New York

Photo: Paul Warchol / GLUCK+

GLUCK+’s self-designed retreat strips the typology to its minimum: a tight square plan, stacked floor by floor, lifted clear of a wooded site. It earns its place in any tower house discussion because it isn’t solving a problem — it’s making an argument. The architects chose the tower when a conventional cabin was possible, which makes it a statement of intent rather than a site-forced solution.

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05 — Speculative / Design Fiction

Sky Tower — Oblivion

Director Joseph Kosinski / Production Design Derek Hill, 2013

Included here deliberately, and without apology. The Sky Tower in Kosinski’s Oblivion is the tower house as pure ambition: a glass and steel platform suspended above the clouds, detached from any ground at all. As production design it is rigorous — every system visible, every surface considered. It expands what the typology can mean when you remove the constraint of the buildable site entirely. Architecture has always used science fiction as a proving ground for ideas.

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06 — Speculative / Concept

Roost Tower House

Benoît Challand, 2014 — Concept

The most poetic entry on the list. Challand’s Roost is essentially a bird blind elevated to the scale of a house: a narrow timber volume perched on legs above a landscape, oriented entirely toward watching and listening. It drops the structural bravura of the column and replaces it with something more vernacular and more eccentric. What it shares with everything else here is the conviction that the ground is negotiable.

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What connects these six projects across six decades and three continents isn’t structural type or material — it’s a shared refusal to accept the site as given. The tower house says: the ground is a starting point, not a destination.

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Related

Oblivion Sky Tower — Architecture of the Film
Zaha Hadid Tower House — The Naomi Campbell Residence