Towers within a Tower brings Hong Kong’s urban verticality into the apartment unit itself. Each apartment unit, typically inhabited as a horizontal slice, instead stacks each room of the apartment one atop the other vertically to create a unit tower. When the units aggregate next to one another, they produce shared outdoor spaces: a local neighborhood at every level. Read from both outside and within the apartment tower, residents can lay the claim “That’s my tower.”

While great variation can occur through these unit adjacencies, an economy of construction maintains three basic unit types: studios, one-bedrooms, and family units. Each of these unit towers are unique in their proportion, organization, and color, to serve the varying needs of each tenant type.

Each tower unit is composed of prefabricated concrete elements, which can be easily mounted onto each other with cast-­in steel­-plate embeds. The concrete frame is clad with colorful ceramic tiles, echoing the common construction material of residential towers in Hong Kong. The modularity of the system and minimal material weight allow for economic fabrication and flexible transportation. This system can be aggregated across scales, from a four­-story rural housing complex to a tower in the city: each time adapting to different ratios of studios, single bedrooms, and family apartments. As a system, the tower unit produces a new typology of residential ­living, where daily life is framed within pixels.