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NATANIA

Completion year: 2022 Gross built area: 12.000 m2 Project location: Godoy Cruz, Mendoza, Argentina Program / Use: Residential Architecture - Collective housing - Photo credits: Luis Abba

The project proposes a high-density collective housing building aimed at a middle-income socioeconomic sector, based on a clear premise: to enhance the residential experience not through increased private surface area, but through spatial quality and the value of shared spaces. In contrast to the repetitive logic typical of this type of development, the central strategy organizes the building around a large longitudinal void that articulates circulation, encounters, and collective uses. This void functions as an open core that concentrates vertical and horizontal circulation through bridges, walkways, and staircases, transforming everyday movement into a spatial experience. Rather than serving as a purely functional corridor, the heart of the building is conceived as an active communal space, an area for gathering, lingering, and informal use, incorporating vegetation and places to sit, play, or simply inhabit. It introduces an added quality rarely found in buildings within this market segment, incorporating attributes more commonly associated with higher-end residential developments. From a functional standpoint, organizing the building around the void frees the perimeter so that primary living spaces –living rooms, dining areas, and main bedrooms– face outward, ensuring good solar exposure and views. Secondary bedrooms are oriented toward the interior core, benefiting from natural ventilation and indirect light while being visually protected through screens and shading elements along the circulation areas. This arrangement optimizes the balance between privacy, environmental comfort, and collective life. The floor plans reveal a clear and repetitive logic in which the structural system organizes both the units and the shared spaces, while the section highlights the vertical continuity of the central void and its articulating role across all levels. Entry to the building occurs through this open space, avoiding closed and dark cores and giving spatial character and identity to the arrival sequence. Materiality reinforces this strategy through a commitment to durability and low maintenance. Exposed concrete, glass, and metal cladding on balconies were selected as resilient materials that age with dignity and require minimal long-term intervention. This decision reflects a realistic understanding of the life cycle of large-scale collective housing, where insufficient maintenance often compromises architectural quality. Here, material choices aim to ensure permanence, robustness, and a stable image over time. The project thus presents a sober, almost anonymous exterior architecture that concentrates its richness within its internal spatial organization. Hierarchy is not expressed as a formal gesture, but as a lived quality: a building in which shared space takes precedence, strengthening middle-income housing through the value of what is collective.

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