Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Infill and Puntal Interventions”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

One final infill project that serves as collective housing is the Alfonso Reyes 58, situated in a vastly different context of the Colonia Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City. The dense residential neighborhood itself is an up-and-coming area with an assortment of restaurants and nightclubs popular amongst the young, white-collar professionals, artists, students, and intellectuals. Designed by Dellekamp Architects and completed in 2003, the complex houses seven units with commercial space and parking on the ground floor on a relatively small site of 390 square meters. Located at the edge of a perimeter block comprising traditional Mexican-style row houses, the reflective, aluminum-clad building of stacked boxes rises six storeys above grade. While this contemporary, rectilinear composition might at first glance seem like a stark contrast to the colorful plastered façades and effusive roofs of the low-rise row houses lining the secondary street, it in fact helps to give shape to the arterial road of Avenida Alfonso Reyes, much in line with the bright-red five-storey shophouse and the high-rise commercial building it is sandwiched between.

Plan-wise, the architects retained the perimeter block nature of the site, creating a C-shaped structure enclosing a modest courtyard, buffering the high levels of noise emanating from the busy street. Starting from the ground floor, the variously sized boxes are overlapped at various points, creating rectangular and L-shaped voids on the sides as well as along the street façade, separating the apartments while creating interior patios and terraces. All the units are elevator-served and accessed via a central lobby; the four units on the third and fourth floors are configured at mirror opposites of each other, both vertically and horizontally, while the three units on the fifth and sixth floors are each unique in plan. In each of these units, the service spaces are pushed to the back, freeing up the space closer to the street fronts for living areas and allowing for ample light and air to enter through the slim bands of clerestory windows. Façade-wise, these apartments are also materially expressed with dissimilar finishes to their aluminum external cladding, differentiated by the two shades, and either smooth or corrugated surfaces. The floor-to-ceiling height extends 3.2 meters, with the cladding functioning as a screen wrapping around the boxes to retain the internal privacy as well as to block out the noise of the city, punctured occasionally by a few small windows. Overall, this urban insertion deploys a similar strategy to Sejima and Nishizawa, where disaggregated blocks can be assembled in a manner that reflects the individuality of each of the units, attaining a high diversity of unit types in a housing typology that has conventionally been associated with mass production and standardization in the modern age.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.