Superblock Precedents
Slowly, but surely, I'm (hopefully) homing in on the real crux of the project. Whereas before I was thinking of my project as one of collection explored through housing, after my last tutorial I'm thinking it should be the other way around. How can I use the idea of collection (of people- their stuff, their stories, their lives) to challenge how we approach design and inhabitation of urban housing?
"The history of cabinets of curiosities began with the notion of a correspondence...between the microcosm and the macrocosm." -Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities
With the above quote in mind, going back to the Merzbau we can view it as a cabinet of curiosities all on its own though not precisely in a cabinet. A deeply personal collection, the Merzbau shows an aggregation of disorder - dense, chaotic, and always changing.
If we then think of the hyper dense examples of urban housing (the Superblock, for instance), we have a space of aggregation, but also one of division with the cellular separation of different flats. This separation hinders the correspondence which is vital to the cabinet of curiosities.
Living in the city, one must accept a certain level of "involuntary collection" of bits of people's lives due to living in such dense quarters. By and large, the conventional attempts of "shared space" are limited by the divided typology. My strategy will be to intervene - to challenge the notion of shared/communal space in the superblock and push the correspondence between the pieces of this collection (here, the residents) to create a cabinet of curiosities for the city. To start, I will begin by removing the corridor of the typical double loaded and/or courtyard building in favour of the progression of connected spaces Robin Evans describes before the invention of the corridor.
"If anything is described by an architectural plan, it is the nature of human relationships..."
-Robin Evans, Figures, Doors, and Passages
First, I will begin with an existing housing project and surgically remove the corridor to see how this can alter the nature of human relationships within it. I've collected a few precedents to choose from; here's a selection:
Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong (now demolished): arguably the "Merzbau" of Housing in its chaotic, uncontrolled growth
Corviale in Rome: another example of urban housing taken over by the residents
typical upper floor plan:
