JAVIER MOSQUERA GONZALEZ Architects
EXPERIMENTAL HOUSING
Type: Open international competition.
Location: Shenzen. China
Year: 2019.
Program: Collective housing
Size: 20.000m2
In an indefinite place, a group of giants with multiple eyes looking towards the horizon, are grouped forming a unique set in which the position of each one adapts to the one of its similar until creating a point of reference in the landscape. The proposal presents a model of residential architecture in which each element, each part of the body of these beings detained in the landscape, can be defined as an individual and differentiated architectural system.
It is a model born from the conception of a basic structural concrete system that defines the geometry on which secondary systems capable of providing a technical response to the needs of a 21st century housing model will be incorporated. The secondary metal structure serves as a union between the large main vertical elements. Two vertical communications cores are inserted between the structural skeletons, with elevators and basic facilities that guarantee the fast vertical routes in all the plants of the proposed volume. Between these cores, a network of stairs is placed, with different paths, which serve as vertical communication between the floors and the different generated spaces, allowing an easy and quick evacuation of the building in case of fire.
The internal spaces, empty spaces in which future tenants will inhabit, resemble the different internal organs of the human body. The internal spatial distribution of the habitable giants of the proposal is divided into three different scales, XL, M and S. The first two scales give an answer to the public places of the building. Spaces in which life in the community is guaranteed as well as the recreational services and uses demanded by today's society. On the ground floor these places are used to generate small commercial and office premises so that an additional profitability can be obtained for the residential operation of the whole complex. The spaces of size S, differentiated in types A, B and C, correspond to the housing units required in the bidding rules and developed in detail in the proposal. The general planning contemplates reserve spaces that can be used as meeting places and that will serve as future extension of the houses built in case there is sufficient demand.
The skin of the created bodies is made up of different layers, one of them fixed, built in glasses with thermal solar control and acoustic absorption properties adaptable to their environment, and a second mobile, composed of mobile elements able to protect from radiation solar from the outside. The epidermal condition of the proposed solutions allows a combination of different materials if required by the environmental conditions of the environment in which the residential giants are implanted.
Like all living beings, created bodies need an internal system that guarantees the distribution of energy throughout its volume. The veins and nervous system of the proposal resolves the HVAC energy systems of the whole, in the lateral facades conceived as large solar collectors that distribute the energy generated through the vertical communication towers. The energy systems of geothermal and solar photovoltaic energy are combined with mechanized construction systems and carried out in the workshop, so that the overall energy and carbon footprint is reduced to the minimum needed by optimizing the energy resources used.
A residential model that proposes an architecture of parts, clearly differentiated, capable of configuring a unit volume adaptable to the environment in which it is implanted. The markedly pedagogical nature of the adopted solution, in which the different systems mentioned above are identified, tries to take advantage of the absence of specific parameters of a site as a unique possibility to investigate architecture as a global system in which the parties have an identity of its own at the same time that they define a differentiated reality of a higher order.