2024 Workshop – Sky Colonies: Cooperative densification in Madrid / Jacob van Rijs + Ignacio Borrego
Cover by students Gaxiola, Real, Sahin, Yasser
Workshop Leaders: Jacob van Rijs + Ignacio Borrego
Date: From 18th to 25th October 2024
The pandemic crisis has changed our perception of our living environments. We now demand a new level of requirements to our residential spaces as home office has been generalized. There is a necessity of new configurations in our homes where qualitative working areas and access to exterior places has become a priority.
This has led in some cases to a reverse Exodus out of the congestion of the city centers to rural or holidays environments but there is still a potential within the cities to achieve these desires without giving up to the attractive advantages of the hectic metropolis.
Proposal by students Gaxiola, Real, Sahin, Yasser
This alternative can be also a sustainable way of extending the cities.
Berlin has recently changed some building regulations to encourage the creation of new housing. The construction of an additional floor on existing buildings is viewed favorably by the Berlin Office for Urban Development and is significantly cheaper than a new construction.
This evenly distributed increase of housing ratio will densify the city and it is a more sustainable model of growth than the new extensions in the periphery. Locally, it also brings an improvement on the building’s overall energy efficiency, increases the value of the property and can be accompanied with a whole-building modernization project.
We propose to develop a hypothetical densification of a selected area of the center of Madrid with the aim that it could trigger bigger scale intervention. A test with a group (associated as a cooperative) colonizing the roofs of the neighborhood of Madrid, Argüelles, could fulfil any dreamed living atmospheres and at the same time setting the principles of a new format of city growth.
Proposal by students D. Christensen, De Luca, Ucha
Cooperative definition
Each group will imagine a possible cooperative community that would share certain interests and could be organized as an entity to propose the purchase of the extra building ratio hypothetically offered by the Municipality of Madrid to extend the city in a sustainable way a promote the building renovation.
This specific community will have enough affinities to be able to create radical and collective environment on the rooftop. The profile and amount of the members is part of the decisions to be taken.
Image by students T. Christensen, Mandi, Voruz
Plot and implementation
Each team will be given a site, and the intervention could affect any existing flat rooftop. All fragments might be connected in one continuous complex within the whole block.
The number of members of the cooperative will depend on the size of the intervention area and the expectation of costs and living area for each one. The construction is limited to the maximum of one extra floor in the 25% of the flat roof top and it will be distributed among the members according to the design.
It is expected to design the private units and the common interior areas (if there are), and the rest of the open-air spaces which will be also private or collective according to the proposal. The project should consider the role of the intervention in cooling down urban heating and the possible contribution to the renewable energy production.
General axonometric of all the MCH projects
Win the pitch
The final presentations will be a fictive meeting with the community of owners of the existing block in the format of a real state pitch to convince them that your offer for extending their building will improve their property and will benefit them, with that aim that they approve the operation.
