The tower was ultimately demolished in 2022, though the capsules were removed first and two dozen are preserved.
FWIW even ignoring the issue with maintenance of the commons, the capsules were originally designed with a 25 years lifespan, but neither refurbishement nor replacement was done during the tower's life.
At opening each capsule cost $110k (in 2024 dollars), during the update proposal 20 years ago renovation costs were estimated at $50k (in 2024 dollars), per capsule.
> The highly complex geometry involved
In my understanding the superstructural geometry was relatively simple, it's a pretty standard core with a lift and a stairwell around it.
The apparent external complexity is because capsules can be attached both longitudinally and transversally, and each "floor" is composed of a large landing for the lift stop and two smaller ones (aka there are three small flights of stairs per floor), and the capsules are attached to each landing, which creates a staggered appearance.
IIRC the tower also had a massive design flaw for mass market: access to the top of a capsule was necessary to remove it, so the capsules were not easily swappable for refurbishment or replacement, or just to move to a different tower with your capsule, something you'd imagine would be an advantage of the design.
Yep, what I felt from the last articles I read in the 3 or 4 years before dismantling them, is the problem wasn't that the building had an expensive maintenance per se, but maintenance being delayed for years and years.
They didn't even have hot water for years. That, plus the low occupancy, so the repairs are split between less people. Plus the land ownership, that maybe it was split from the apartment ownership and you'd need to pay additional fees. And I didn't know (or remember) what you commented about the inability to remove pods that had another pods over them, that's a maintenance bummer.
It's like a car (or your teeth), when you begin to delay maintenance. It's not only the cost of the summed delayed maintenance, but the additional surprises that could appear because the unmaintained property degrades faster.
Capsule design in general was a popular idea, but swapping isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.
The one place you do see capsule architecture is cruise ships. The rooms are built elsewhere and then slotted into the ship en masse. But in this case, ships are moved to a shipyard to be serviced. In the tower model, the maintenance machines have to come to the tower, which is much harder to make economically viable for single replacements.
> swapping isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.
Eh. If it had caught up it’s pretty reasonable that capsule design would have supported such a use case, by adding features to securely stow items as on ships or planes e.g. latches, strap hooks, etc…