Description

The Urbanización Cañaveral, built in two phases and completed in 1998, is a project that aimed to improve the formal and spatial characteristics of low-income housing. It is located on the western hills of Medellin, in an area that has developed in the 1990s due to the construction of a cable car which connects settlements in the hills with the city’s metro svstem. The steep topography determined the linear alignment of houses in rows that twist slightly in order to accommodate themselves to the contour lines. Not only does this arrangement minimise the amount of excavation necessary to prepare the site, it also maximises the flow of air through the buildings and guarantees that views are not obstructed. As the rows of houses adapt to the topography, a series of public areas are formed between them. These have been minimally landscaped with only the necessary pathways, lighting, benches and refuse collection points. The intention is to encourage residents to appropriate these areas by introducing whichever function the community deems necessary. The green areas on the periphery of the site were left untouched in order to allow local vegetation to grow. The communal car park is located on the south-eastern corner of the site, nearer to the road, in order to avoid the cost of building internal streets, as well as to liberate as much area as possible for communal use.

There are 150 housing units divided in six different types – three types in each of the two stages of construction. Once the position of the six longitudinal blocks had been established, the design team proceeded to subdivide the length of the blocks into plots of 6 x 12 metres. Each plot contains three housing units which are distributed vertically over two or three levels.

The units are intricately intertwined in such a way that every apartment has its own entrance, balcony and laundry area. Although the intricacy of the distribution restricts flexibility and impedes the future transformation of the apartments, it introduces an interesting spatial quality that many social housing schemes do not have. It also has an effect on the exterior image of the project, which appears as a regular series of volumes expressed by two different materials: brick and concrete blocks.

 

 

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Originally published in: Felipe Hernández, Beyond Modernist Masters. Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, Birkhäuser, 2009.