“... Transposed to the urban key, the enthusiasm for this vacant, expectant, imprecise, fluctuating spaces is a response to our strangeness before the world, before our city, before ourselves...” Terrain Vague, Ignasi Sola Morales, 1995.
This building is located in Palermo, one of the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires City, on the tree-covered Nicaragua street with a strong identity in terms of neighborhood sub-centralities, on a 34 meters width plot, between party walls, and variable 26m to 50m length towards the block core, being this a considerable block portion regarding its scale within the configuration of the urban fabric.
This design represents a turning point from different points of view, regarding its planning and development. On one hand, as architectural structure it maintains and deepens the project material-structure matters, it explores the modern ways of inhabiting going in depth about the inhabitant construction, and location and dimensions of external spaces interconnected with each inhabited internal space; on the other hand, it defines a clear position understanding the environment and preexistences, particularly taking into account that a building of scale may be established as a Manifesto for that matter in a block and its surroundings.
Surroundings as political action
The Urban Planning Code in force at that moment, stipulated the possibility of developing a tower building type by complying with certain measurements and surface land characteristics. Having those elements and adopting that building type, the development was rewarded with greater building capacity.
Facing this possibility, our position was to take on a commitment of not adopting this unbound typology but to design a building that may reach the virtual internal line of the block's core, thus adjusting it to the block’s even context, respecting the neighborhood identity and its characteristics, even with its diverse heights, typical of the city urban fabric.
Request for this reaching-the-internal-line permit to the City authorities meant getting authorization to build with the tower-building capacity but in a reaching-the-internal-line building that allowed us to strengthen the adjacent emptiness, the views that this fabric represented and to deliver a message in respect to our possibility as architects and developers to question our laws and ask about what type of city we want.
The architectonic material structure
Dividing the plot into eight 4m units, the geometrical construction of the project from the front to the rear facade defines measurement of the living spaces. In the other direction, two central structural supporting partitions, which make the vertical circulation nucleus, go up along the building connecting with the columns, partitions, and beams, thus defining the project structural construction. This construction becomes expressive and apparent, sometimes as a boundary between internal spaces, sometimes as an assembling element between interior and exterior.
In addition, four 1m-height beams laid every two levels go through the whole front facade of the project defining three programmatic groups with diverse situations regarding space, emptiness, continuities and typologies, which are the edge interconnecting the building, the urban space, and the preexistences.
This project structure appeals a person to change its perception of the architectonic object scale, in dialogue with the existing house fabric and low-and-medium-density buildings, inviting it to investigate and perceive the project as a unit -with the intention of balancing its composing elements- being expanded towards the interior and showing interconnection between the whole and its parts.
Two big central green courtyards interconnect with the immediate surroundings and integrate the project units in their connection between front and rear facade. The air flows in the interstices between the own and the already existing constructions, creating from those contact points new shared exterior spaces and links between urban air, courtyards, and block interiors. These structures strengthen the adjacent emptiness and place new continuities between interiors and urban space in diverse heights, thus creating continuous and crossed views between their own and others’ expansions.
To get in contact with the other means to make contact one another with tact, but respecting emptiness, silence, as well. Thus, this project suggests collective -sometimes confusing- situations, as well as individual experiences. When getting closer and then away, it tries to re-discover different ways of linking what is constructed and projected, delineating an edge as a suggested interconnection between the own and the others’ spaces.
The process of modern inhabiting
If multifamily house projects entail a repetition apparently undifferentiated, the question within the framework of our project would be: how to manage building the identity of the other's space so that repetition does not hurt?
By redesigning the housing characteristics, a deconstruction search around the typological is involved, from a joint construction between the Firm and inhabitants.
To think of a collective houses project as high-rise houses with different suggestions searching their identities. The structural construction allows monitored transformations along the project process with the future inhabitant, who has a clear and defined initial design, it is a joint process of transforming action and innovative end with uncertainties and anchors.
Almost as an assembly, these high-rise houses alternate their layout with intermediary spaces where turning climbing and interconnected expansions are developed, this way enhancing the internal courtyards and the air flow between interstices, mixing uninterruptedly the urban with the interiors.
Some relax spaces are arranged horizontally towards the front facade, some are arranged facing the rear facade thus taking advantage of the courtyards as spaces interconnecting the public and the private areas. Double-heights in duplex apartments are sometimes located at the entrance, reversing the typical relation of this spatial situation; in others they are located in the living rooms so respecting the relax areas and controlling natural light; in others located in connection with the exterior thus enhancing the link with the outside.
In some units, the living and cooking areas are arranged towards the front, in others towards one or both of the sideways. External areas are designed as locations in themselves with their own activity, so, their dimensions, scale changes, and diverse spatial relations.
On the ground floor, there are business premises opened to the street and a multi-level entrance, as a track with grooves that mark out the internal and external spaces to finally reach the block's green core which resembles an internal forest.
Everything within a defined architectural material construction.
Diverse contact points with those already existing.
Air flowing around it all, and houses that pretend to define their own identity within diversity, almost as a garden with trails that branch off and try to find their own identity within the game.
