How Architecture Shapes Housing, Community & Sustainability

London’s skyline dazzles with landmarks like The Shard and the Gherkin—but behind the iconic silhouettes lies a deeper story: the city’s long experiment with high-density housing. Since the mid-20th century, three key tower typologies have shaped how Londoners live, how communities form, and how sustainability challenges are tackled.

Understanding these three dominant types—the slab, the point, and the cluster—is essential for anyone interested in how cities function. Each has its architectural language, social logic, and environmental legacy.

Let’s dive into the towers that define modern London—and the futures they hint at.

🧱 The Slab Tower: The Post-War Workhorse

Slab towers are the linear giants of post-war optimism—long blocks that aimed to replace slums with fresh air, space, and light. One of the most recognisable is the Aylesbury Estate (1960s–70s), once one of Europe’s largest social housing projects. These were about quantity, modernity, and speed.

🔧 Construction & Design

Typically made from reinforced concrete using in-situ or prefabricated methods, slab towers are efficient to build. Their horizontal form stacks apartments along corridors, sometimes internal, often via external gallery access.

Another major example, The Brunswick Centre (1972), merges slab housing with mixed-use ambition—integrating housing, shops, and cinema into one brutalist megastructure.

In contrast, new developments like Park Central West (2021) at Elephant Park show how slabs have evolved: now with high-performance façades, internal corridors, generous public realm, and a focus on human-scaled density.

🏘️ Social Value

While early slabs improved living standards, they often struggled with scale and social connection. Monotonous corridors and maintenance issues led to feelings of isolation. But thoughtful landscaping, amenities, and mixed-use programs—as the Brunswick—can bring life back to the slab form.

🌱 Sustainability

Slabs have high embodied carbon, but many are structurally sound—ideal for retrofit. The Aylesbury Estate’s phased regeneration is a case in point: a blend of demolition and upgrade, preserving embodied energy while adding better insulation, ventilation, and renewables.

🏗️ The Point Tower: Vertical Community with Breathing Space

Unlike slabs, point towers rise vertically with a small footprint, often a square plan around a central core. They became popular for preserving open ground space and offering dual-aspect apartments.

🔧 Construction & Design

Earlier examples include Keeling House (1957), designed by Denys Lasdun. It’s a masterpiece of clustered point blocks, each flat angled for light and privacy, all accessed via elevated communal walkways. Keeling’s aim? Dignity in vertical living, with the social fabric of a Georgian terrace.

Fast-forward to Mapleton Crescent (2021), a sleek CLT (cross-laminated timber) tower in Wandsworth. Its 27 stories prove that point towers can be sustainable, elegant, and neighbourly, with shared roof terraces and flexible layouts.

🏘️ Social Value

Point towers often integrate better into existing neighbourhoods, offering ground-level green space and less visual bulk. Communal areas and slender footprints mean better eyes on the street and stronger urban stitching.

🌱 Sustainability

Their form allows for efficient daylighting and natural ventilation. When built from timber or refurbished with modern cladding and heat recovery systems, they can hit high standards for energy use and emissions.

🌐 The Cluster Tower: Density Meets Design

The newest kid on the block, cluster towers arrange multiple vertical volumes around shared cores or platforms. This typology maximises daylight, views, and social interaction, responding to critiques of both slab and point towers.

🔧 Construction & Design

Cluster towers often embrace non-linear plans and varied heights. Think of The Verdean (2023–ongoing) in Acton: a contemporary estate of connected towers that blends private and affordable homes with shared gardens, terraces, and active street edges.

They owe a debt to Keeling House’s clustered strategy and Brunswick’s integration of public space, but with more environmental tech and architectural variety.

🏘️ Social Value

These towers prioritise community infrastructure: co-working lounges, rooftop gardens, and bike repair stations. The diversity of unit types and scales encourages social mix and intergenerational living.

🌱 Sustainability

Cluster towers are designed with passive principles: oriented for solar gain, cross-ventilated, and often featuring green roofs, greywater systems, and air-source heat pumps. Their design reflects a shift from quantity to quality at scale.

🔎 Why It Matters

Understanding tower types isn’t just for architects. These buildings shape how we live, how we connect, and how we tackle the climate crisis.

🏗️ Cost & Density

• Slabs: Maximise units per footprint, cost-effective, but socially fragile.

• Points: Balance efficiency with integration and open space.

• Clusters: Offer holistic community and sustainability, but may cost more upfront.

🤝 Social Experience

Where slabs are sometimes isolated, newer point and cluster forms invite interaction, with better communal areas, balconies, and ground-level vibrancy.

♻️ Sustainability

Retrofitting older towers—especially slabs and points—is a major carbon-saving opportunity. New builds like Mapleton Crescent or The Verdean show that high-rise can be low-impact when designed with care.

👀 Look Around: Which Tower Type Do You Live Near?

Whether you’re in London or another global city, you’ve likely passed a slab, point, or cluster tower. They’re not just concrete and steel—they’re reflections of policy, ambition, and imagination.

Next time you pass one, ask yourself:

💬 Join the conversation—what tower typology does your neighbourhood reflect? And which one offers the future you want to live in?