Six Story Townlet

I keep thinking about the streets and squares in Zurich defined by well proportioned six story flexible use buildings.   Elegant human scaled accommodations for residents and businesses in about the same land area as an equivalent highrise development.

The highrise is often taken for granted as the most desirable and profitable model to serve large populations.  It often works well at the economic high end but becomes less and less successful as incomes diminish.  The highrise ground floor has less entrepreneurial potential due to the small number of ground floor entrances and large building depth.

A Six Story Townlet has great potential as an alternative to highrise development.  The drawings and charts below illustrate that their quantitative equivalence.  

Qualitatively, the Six Story Townlet is superior to the highrise in a number of ways that are rarely considered.  The social and entrepreneurial potential of The Townlet is considerately greater than the highrise due to the number of ground level entrances, The Six Story Townlet - 145 entrances vs. Highrise Equivalent - 30 entrances.  The real estate is more flexible in that The Townlet has an 60,000 square feet of flexible ground floor space  more than it's highrise equivalent.   Physical contact with nature is inherently stronger since all are closer to the ground.  The Townlet is technically simpler due to its lower height and smaller footprints, lighter structural loads, less critical vertical transportation, simpler mechanical and electrical distribution.