Santo Santiago Houses
If you look for Uruapan on Google, you will find rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, and dead people. This projects uses Google’s first three hits,which revolve around Uruapan’s landscape qualities, to try to change Uruapan’s image of an unsafe city that some people might hold.
The chosen site for this project borders the National Park Barranca del Cupatitzio on its south side. An old water channel, which more than a hundred years ago supplied water to the San Pedro factory, separates the site from a section of the park which, until now, was inaccessible.
The project is made up by a series of houses of indefinite size, placed along a grid of walls. Just as in Montreal’s Murs à pêches and Pantellaria’s Giardini Panteschi, walls are used to create different microclimates within the complex.
This grid made out of walls produces three types of space: private space, consisting of covered rooms with a controlled climate, semi-private uncovered patios and walls with large openings, and public space, comprised by larger patios with lush greenery.
The project wanted people to be able to walk from the street directly into the park, through the complex. Thus, the porous placing of these three types of spaces. This porosity increases when someone chooses to transform one of their patios (semi-public space) into a more public space, whether it be an outdoor café, a gallery, a greenhouse, a co-working space, or any other outdoor program.
The separation between walls is similar, which allows for an undefined program to take place and for the creation of flexible houses, which can grow in size, depending on the amount of rooms the owner wants. In this sense, an owner can choose to make on of its rooms independent, open it toward one of the patios, and turn it into an office, a store, or a dwelling unit.
Each house has a view, both to different patios and to different neighbors; with this, the sense of community increases, while preserving privacy.
