Dezeen is giving away five copies of Building Community: New Apartment Architecture by Michael Webb, which charts the growth of terraced towers, social housing, luxury high-rises and other contemporary apartment buildings.
The book highlights innovative apartment designs from around the world. It looks to buildings that have enhanced the lives of their inhabitants, surroundings and urban environment, and asks how we can learn from them.
Six-storey blocks are stacked in twos, threes and fours in Ole Scheeren's 24-storey village The Interlace in Singapore. Photograph by Iwan Baan
"Building Community is the major first survey in years to explore contemporary apartments not as canvases for interior decoration but as a building type of growing significance," said Webb. "There's an urgent need to build more and better apartments: to relieve the shortage of affordable housing in major cities, to use scarce land more economically, to save the energy wasted on long distance commutes and to revitalise urban centres."
The book includes projects such as Ole Scheeren's Interlace in Singapore, which was named World Building of the Year in 2015. The structure was conceived as an antithesis to the standard tower block and consists of a number of apartment blocks stacked diagonally, one on top of another.
MAD's Absolute towers in Canada were initially dubbed "the Marilyn Monroe towers" by local residents in reference to their shapely bodies. Photograph by Iw...