Authors’ Comment
The project consists in placing a functional package of commercial spaces located on the ground floor and demi-collective housing on the upper floors into a site with challenging dimensions and proportions. The building is unwrapped along the site’s perimeter, forming a large interior courtyard towards which the apartments are oriented. Thus, the volumetric restraints directed towards an introverted solution, gambling on the communication with the interior space of the courtyard. It contains a set of walkways that function as an access device to the apartments, but also as an opportunity for residents to meet and strengthen connections and form a community. This way, an efficient access solution is obtained without compromising the apartments’ spaces and without a volumetric presence that would be too large for the given site.
On the urban level, the project has a temperate presence, fitting into the existing context, breaking itself volumetrically when needed in order to visually integrate into the discontinuous regime of the street front and considering its pace into the façade’s rhythm, a rigorous composition locally softened by the elements of the façade.