androiduk
Senior Member
Perhaps a bias against anonymity - living in a box in the sky, not knowing your neighbours, not necessarily caring to - is at the root of this aberrant attitude? If so, it's a strange thing to find in a big city, where getting lost in the crowd is one of the defining possibilities, and something that makes urban living attractive.
Perhaps some architects internalize this attitude and try to create a compensatory "sense of house" in their multi-unit buildings - Safdie's Habitat, Teeple's Gansevoort for instance. Others embrace the communal qualities that minimalist residential towers express, and they find a market for what they do - not everyone wants to live in a little house at street level and generations of Torontonians have been happy to rent ( and, since the first condos were built in Ontario in 1968, own ) in tower buildings instead.
"House" is just a different concept from "condo" - not a superior one.
I find this applies more in the larger buildings. In the low rise (say under 15 storeys) people may be even more social than house dwellers. In my 11 storey building, I know about 90% of the residents and have done business with about 30% of them.