MONTANI Arquitectos
Collective housing and green space at urban transport hubs
Many cities around the world, and particularly in Latin America, grow from public transport routes, generating neighborhood development hubs that spontaneously take over the territory, regulated only by the market and, in the best of cases, by some urban planning laws that have little to do with the discipline of architecture.
Creating low or medium density cities with high service costs, transportation and many deficiencies in green spaces for recreation, service infrastructure, security, public administration, organization of commerce, generating very large urban suburbs and the consequent fragmentation of them due to the multiplicity of transportation networks that converge in the same transfer node.
This thesis proposes a reflection on this problem while simultaneously developing low-cost housing projects centered around transportation hubs that currently operate outside the theoretical, methodological, and technical frameworks of architecture. These frameworks are essential for understanding the use, management, and maintenance of these areas, thereby preventing the formation of ghettos and large residual areas of informal settlement.
Furthermore, to delve deeper into the enormous interest surrounding the urban landscape and the revision of the classic relationships between the land, which is neither homogeneous nor delimited, indeterminate and also unstable, with what is built.
Understanding the landscape as another category of the operating system that makes up inhabiting the city.
Recognizing the lack of green spaces and the need for densification in areas near the transfer center, associated with the unregulated growth of the urban fabric, the lack of clear protocols for commercial proliferation and improvisation in terms of zonal management, the project of a habitable public park is proposed that reconstructs a new territory or type of territoriality where these problems intertwine and mutually correspond, consolidating new places of appropriation for the city, with a new artificial topography called a habitable public park that operates in the territory of the Liniers railway station.
On a plot of land approximately 800 meters long by 100 meters wide, bordering to the north with the low-density housing neighborhood, to the south with the Liniers railway station, to the west with Gral. Paz Avenue and its connection to the AMBA West sector, and to the east with the future park mentioned in the Urban Environmental Plan.
This thesis proposes a reflection on this problem while simultaneously developing low-cost housing projects centered around transportation hubs that currently operate outside the theoretical, methodological, and technical frameworks of architecture. These frameworks are essential for understanding the use, management, and maintenance of these areas, thereby preventing the formation of ghettos and large residual areas of informal settlement.
Furthermore, to delve deeper into the enormous interest surrounding the urban landscape and the revision of the classic relationships between the land, which is neither homogeneous nor delimited, indeterminate and also unstable, with what is built.
Understanding the landscape as another category of the operating system that makes up inhabiting the city.
This is how the project addresses the deformation of the old structures related to the challenges of a residential hub, transforming them into dynamic spaces, intersecting movements, functional fluctuations, and overlaps between different levels that relate the architecture to almost geological processes of movement, achieved through the imbrication of layers of uses rather than volumes. Topography, rather than volumetry.
This dynamic is not unrelated to the consideration of emptiness as an architectural material, due to its abstract, diffuse component, beyond the architectural form, that quality of ambiguity made up of absences and presences, which allow, through a landscape in resonance with its qualities and precisely instrumented, to cross wide lines of flight in which the surfaces that resolve the uses in imbricated relationships are manifested forcefully.
Soil-on-soil relationships raise the paradoxical question of densification and disappearance.
We are committed to upholding our most cherished values in every project and task we undertake.
