Within the main strategies of the Modern Movement, a thing that insistently appears is the so-called ‘planning in section’: housing rooms enclosed in vertically-displaced story buildings. Resorting to Wells Coates’ words, the traditional flat apartment has evolved into other models, with distinct single-story not flat solutions. Such strategy brought multiple advantages, from higher space efficiency, by reducing the collective flow of people, to the minimization of noise level transmission from between adjacent rooms. The most classic model is likely that of Unité d’Habitation de Marseille (1947), by Le Corbusier, but before and after that, several models were built, a lot of them in America and Latin America, boasting geometries even more intricate and complex. It is not hard to find models that, when observing their section, denote high complexity. Inside, the rooms often appear displaced in multiple levels, with variations of one height, one-and-a-half height, double height ceiling, of several duplex, triplex floors, etc. Sometimes, words lack to name the large number of types of apartments that may be hidden behind such homogeneous image. This seems to have a certain parallelism to what is happening today. If, throughout the Modern Movement, the façades were built as perfect prisms, now it seems that there is some insistency in getting away from this concept by exposing diversity. The current façades often like to show the abundance of ‘random compositions’ or ‘enriching heterogeneity’ in a system in which the internal complexity plays an important role as indicator of plurality. Multiplicity and complexity proudly boast themselves and are also composition resources.
