Integration VS Differentiation - New Humanity for New Society - A housing design experiment based on DISTANCE

Integration VS Differentiation -
New Humanity for New Society - A housing design experiment based on DISTANCE -

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New Formal Housing Design to add Density to existing Formal Housing Blocks

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Mexico City is urbanizing at the push of intangible forces: the collapse of traditional family structures, the rise of individualism, polarization of income groups, and inevitable knotting of buildings throughout the existing urban fabric. The response of architecture to urbanization within such a framework is crucial to sustaining the city throughout social happenings, memories, generations and individuals.

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Research concerning local social structures and trends guided our assumptions for the design and led us to test a novel housing typology as an immediate response to the new urbanism. As part of the intermediate stage of urban renewal, existing buildings are assumed viable and become part of the new, imbuing the site with constraints and contextual qualities. Our design re-articulates the unit of the “home” as a dwelling cluster, a gesture of the perpetually unfinished state of urbanization.

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Central to the design is the concept of the “corridor,” which provides the functional needs of minimum connectivity between separated rooms, while also maintaining ambiguity in privacy, openness and undefined usages in nature. Outstretched corridors evolve into bridges and gathering spaces, on the one hand celebrating intimate communities between generations while on the other underscoring the importance and privacy of individual units, fulfilling a desire for dynamic equilibrium between individualism and communal intimacy.