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Architects: Castellitti Bertoni Arquitectos
Text description provided by the architects. How to act in the perimeter of central areas? What happens when the neighborhood itself is an edge? Certain neighborhoods of our old cities have been frozen in time and that initial spatial, experiential and environmental quality has deteriorated, old neighbors are gone, industrial or commercial activities have appropriated them generating a confused, uncertain urban image, ambiguous and lacking in character.
In these already old areas, (this one is from the workers for the construction of the port of Santa Fe in 1900) substituting the urban tissue is common. The original lots intended for housing display homogeneous spatial, formal and dimensional features, they are deep and narrow, and have been subdivided in many cases. The same happens with the porosity of solid and void, the urban scale and the buildings.
With these characteristics as a basis, our study designs and plans several sets of paired individual homes, aiming to keep a certain value of life, use and coexistence from the old neighborhood. We propose individual access, direct link with the sidewalk and private patios, and porosity, while we densify the land use generating a relationship between the built and unbuilt square meters that allows the income for the developer and access to the dwellings for the users.
Materially, the project is designed with a mixed structure: load-bearing walls and lightweight steel structure complete with enclosures almost entirely built with dry construction: mini prefabricated slabs, light roof, gates and enclosures with metal frames and wood siding. The overall result is displayed returning to the idea of repetition of the unit (typically in neighborhoods consolidated by addition) and that of entirety manifested through materiality. The passage of time will allow us to see how each unit is individualized from their neighbors.
