Social Housing Z53 | MICHAN ARCHITECTURE

The project is located on a rectangular plot with its shortest side facing the street, on an area with a high demand of social housing in Mexico City. The 42 units are placed in three towers, generating interior courtyards for views and natural ventilation for each apartment, connecting them with tow vertical cores and bridges above the patios. The buildings have five floors and an underground parking floor which is made of reinforced concrete, transferring the loads to masonry brick walls on the fifth levels above. The masonry brick walls play an important role on the project as they are part of the structure and re-interpret the traditional brick wall, blurring the boundary between structure and ornament. With the use of a single unit; red mud artisanal brick we were able to produce a heterogeneous coherence, creating walls that are sensible to the lights and shadows and respond The constrains of the project such as; budget, materials, structure and density where conceived as opportunities which with few mutations form the traditional construction techniques generated new spatial qualities that responds to the local aesthetic, producing new alternatives and relations between technology an tradition.