Santa Rufina Housing
The project proposes a clear urban object through a certain abstraction without renouncing its domestic content. The floor plan organisation, around a ring of service elements and a central courtyard associated with the stairs, improves the ventilation conditions of the dwellings and allows maximum use to be made of the perimeter of the façade. The open-plan floor above the commercial and office base, conceived as a sort of ground floor raised above the streets, contains a set of common uses, normally difficult to implement in dense urban fabrics, which improve the value of the dwellings it serves.
On a precise geometric support, a complex and very tight jigsaw puzzle of offices, commercial premises and car parks, and housing has been composed, in which all of them offer a clear organisation and configure a comfortable living space. The living rooms of the larger dwellings occupy the corners, projecting through large windows onto the terraces, which are generous in size and behave like an open-air room for family dinners or outdoor reading. The openings, protected by retractable louvres, ensure adequate regulation of the climate exposure of the interior spaces of the house at different times of the year. The kitchens have been treated as spaces that are visually and functionally integrated with the living rooms and terraces, proposing an open and contemporary way of living. The project seeks to transform into a valuable work of architecture a 'commercial development' with a mixed programme that, like many others, seeks to offer a 'differentiated' project, but using the same metric and spatial rules of convention that generally admit little risk and innovation.
