Vertical Society

The design of Downtown Athletic Club seemed to form a new trend for the development of our society at that time. "Each plan as a collage of functions that describes on the synthetic platforms an episode of Metropolitan ritual. Each of the rectangles of the Downtown Athletic Club is such a scenario with a highly suggestive-if abstract-plot." Here we see a vertical form versus the horizontal form of our traditional society.

Our traditional society has, for along time, developed and spread out horizontally. The daily activities are formed on the ground and streets. However, the culture of congestion in Manhattan push us to develop a new kind of social structure: the vertical one. Each floor of Downtown Athletic Club contains a unique program and the combination of all floors forms a vertical society where each activity on each floor has a relationship to each other. The open and flexible space on each floor also allows mankind to "experiment techno-psychic apparatus designed by themselves to celebrate their own design".