E Central Building

E-Central Building Architecture should strive to dignify human condition, in any context or scale. We have always tried to live by this premise in our projects, as we believe this is the most sincere road towards appropriation, which in our view is the only measure of success an architectural project should be judged by. Nowhere is this more explicit than in low-income housing, where the scarcity of resources and imagination, cause housing projects to be undignified for their final users. We are firm believers that regardless of a housing project's budget, the design should provide its final users with a sense of proudness and dignity about their dwellings. In Mexico City, there is a definite difference in the design between lower, middle, and upper-class residential buildings. Developers focusing on social housing projects tend to leave aside original architectural design, frequently recurring to generic solutions that have been recycled throughout decades, and these projects sprout in all over the city as copy and paste buildings. This project responds to one of these areas. The building is located in a central borough in Mexico City which has started to redevelop as a result of a change in the city's development plan for the area. It provided an increase in density and building height, which in turn has prompted developers to create new low-income housing developments in the area. Our building is one of those new developments. It is an eight-story apartment building that houses 20 apartments about 60 square meters each of inhabitable space. For our project, we wanted to break the orthogonality present in the trace of the streets, but also present in general in the rest of the buildings that surround it, but how can we do this while keeping an uncomplicated concrete frame structure and keeping the general cost low? We had to work within those confines to give the building a distinct character that would set it apart. So we ended coming up with a facade that would undulate both horizontally and vertically in such a way that the building would seem to change shape depending on your perspective, making it a focal point in a usually nondescript neighborhood of Mexico City. We embraced the used of concrete walls as they were required for structural stability but further made them patent in having the concrete stamped with wooden forms that would bring out its natural beauty. The housing units we designed are aimed at the lowest income levels in the city, but while we kept the project's financials intact, we managed to produce a formal and sculptural building within our budget by carefully designing and defining building materials. In the end, building costs are indeed the same for a poorly designed building as well for a brilliant one. So why not design a brilliant one?