A social housing project inspired by Mexico City's Vecindades

While the house can be understood to be the basic building block of the City, a City should not just be an aggregation of houses.Cities also need to provide “free” spaces to complement and enrich people’s lives, offering a mix of different programs related to living, working, leisure, and services. The connections between different types of spaces, from public to private, should provoke social interaction where people of different ages and groups can freely engage and are invited to interact. The notion of “free-spaces” as a primary connector is the foundation for our proposal of housing and its relationship to the City. We envision a vibrant neighborhood where people move freely and the car is no longer a protagonist.

The court-based “Vecindad” housing typology found throughout downtown Mexico City inspired this solution to provide collective housing within horizontal city blocks. A central patio (court) serves the dual roles of community space and connector to the individual housing types around it. This typology offers residents a space for interaction with the city as well as a means to provide a filter between public life and the intimacy of the house. Four “vecindades”, or open court levels, are situated within the block. The courts overlap in both the north-south and east-west directions, creating a collective block matrix that allows for different access levels for different users. All four courts are connected to the sky and allow for vegetation to occur on five levels of the project.

Every house in our proposal has an exterior room, which serves as transition space from court and entrance to the house, while providing for natural ventilation and lighting to all living spaces. Vegetation in the courts and exterior rooms connects all of the houses to nature Expandable while providing degrees of privacy.

Project by Javier Sanchez Arquitectos & Robert Hutchison Architecture
Fayetteville, AR, Project 2018 (Unbuilt)
Project Team: Javier Sanchez, Robert Hutchison, Barbara Swift, Constance Mine, Sean Morgan, Madeline Black, Andres Villareal
Housing Northwest Arkansas Competition Finalist, 2018