Project 09, 2nd Edition Modern Construction Case Studies - Precedent: Laboratory, Philadelphia designed by Louis Kahn

Vertical Neighborhoods and the Logic of Layers

Project 09, a laboratory tower in Riyadh, reinterprets the modernist notion of “served and servant” spaces in a vertical typology, challenging normative understandings of programmatic hierarchy, enclosure, and infrastructural organization. Drawing on a lineage that predates Louis Kahn’s formal articulation, the project reframes the role of service space within an integrated system of environmental performance, urban strategy, and architectural meaning. In doing so, it participates in a broader discourse around typological mutation and the spatial ethics of buildings that no longer rest on the primacy of function alone.

Project 09 is a research tower sited in a dispersed urban landscape in Riyadh. It draws from the formal and conceptual strategies of Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1957–61), a project that crystallized the now-canonical distinction between “served” and “service” spaces. Kahn’s articulation of these two spatial categories—lab as served, service towers as servant—not only clarified architectural function but also gave physical and symbolic form to infrastructural systems that modernism had often concealed or minimized.

However, this conceptual framework did not arise in a vacuum. Kahn’s ideas were deeply rooted in earlier architectural and philosophical traditions that sought to expose and celebrate the latent structures of buildings. The École des Beaux-Arts, with its emphasis on parti and spatial sequence, often embedded a logic of hierarchy between representative and functional space. Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1850) and the exposed iron vaults of his Bibliothèque Nationale reflect an early attempt to dignify infrastructure. Similarly, the 19th-century industrial buildings of England and the rationalist works of Otto Wagner proposed spatial clarity as both a technical and moral pursuit—anticipating Kahn’s vision of “form and design” as distinct but intertwined (Kahn, 1961; Vidler, 1987).

Project 09 advances this tradition but reframes its theoretical underpinnings for a contemporary context. Where Kahn externalized the servant spaces into distinct volumetric towers—expressing a literal separation—Project 09 internalizes and thickens this relationship. In this tower, the support functions are neither hidden nor pushed aside but embedded within a glazed interstitial zone that wraps around the opaque laboratory cores. This strategy reflects an epistemological shift in architectural thinking: from the functionalist separation of use to an understanding of architecture as a negotiated field of relationships, affect, and performance.

The project’s Riyadh context is critical to this evolution. The building exists in a cityscape characterized by discontinuity, autonomy, and a lack of dense historical layering. Unlike Kahn’s campus-based Richards Laboratories, where the contextual fit was driven by academic urbanism, Project 09 operates in a field of high-performance, iconographic buildings. Here, architecture becomes less about embedding in a fabric and more about staging a spatial ecology that negotiates light, structure, program, and visibility.

In this sense, Project 09 is a vertical neighborhood, a term that resists the reduction of towers to isolated objects. Drawing on recent discourse in vertical urbanism (Graham, 2019), the project stacks a sequence of interdependent programs, forming a community of spaces rather than a monolithic tower. This vertical logic, however, is not merely compositional—it is ontological. Each level, each sectional incision, becomes a site where the servant-served duality is reconfigured as a continuum, where circulation and mechanical space are no longer inert but active participants in the spatial drama of the building.

Moreover, the project engages with contemporary theories of post-functionalism and systems thinking in architecture. As argued by Stan Allen in Points + Lines (1999), infrastructure is not neutral—it generates form. In Project 09, this insight materializes through the integration of structure, services, and spatial articulation. The carved façade and vertical light courts act not only as devices of environmental performance but as architectural expressions of internal complexity.

Whereas modernism sought clarity through separation, Project 09 finds clarity through integration—through the layering of program, infrastructure, and light. The building is not “readable” in the classical sense but legible as a field of intensities and overlaps. It is not a diagram of function but a spatial ecology, animated by movement, support, and sectional variation.

Project 09 operates at the intersection of architectural theory, typological experimentation, and environmental responsiveness. It neither mimics the formal gestures of its precedents nor reduces them to nostalgic references. Instead, it builds upon a deep theoretical lineage—from Beaux-Arts hierarchies to Kahn’s modernist syntax—and translates it into a contemporary architectural language. In doing so, it contributes to a broader rethinking of vertical architecture as a site of civic, infrastructural, and symbolic complexity.

References

• Allen, S. (1999). Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City.

• Benevolo, L (1984). A History of Modern Architecture

• Graham, S. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers.

• Kahn, L. I. (1961). Talks with Students.

• Kostof, S. (1995). A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals.

• Vidler, A. (1987). The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment.