“….Diurnal hinging allows expansion of the living area during the day, reclaimed by bedrooms at night. Episodic hinging reflects change in family over time; rooms can be added or subtracted accommodating grown-up children leaving or elderly parents moving in….. (Steven Holl, Fukuoka, 1991)
Urban villa is a massive block for the inner outskirts, able to give more order to a fragmented context. Section type is a building in line, or corner, for the high density and mixed use city, the facades dialogue with the urban complexity.
The residential Tower is a building with an high visual relationship with the far context, for the “green” recovery of the inner city, the facades are a kind of continuity of the landscape in an ironic way (James Wines, Site).
The residential units are conceived with an high flexibility “internal” and “external”, so to keep the same architectural design for both L and M size building. The Section building explores the meaning of “vertical mixed use”, it contains duplex apartments and different activities and a suspended open common space.
The Urban Villa and the Tower explore the expansion of the common space as part of the relationship space in- between the private units. The relation/common space is not only a space of distribution of the fluxes, horizontal and vertical, but it is also the connecting tissue between visual and physical relationship.
The representation of the site is related to the Russian context based on the pictures of the Russian photographer Denis Esakov and the architectural language used in the architecture of buildings is a suggestion related to different landscapes.
The units are conceived in two different design: for the Urban villa and the Tower building the main design issue is the horizontal flexibility and for the Gallery building the vertical flexibility. The flexibility is assured by changing of the layout shape of the units during the time and referring the user. In each units there is a fixed zone for the service area (kitchen and bathrooms) and all the units have moveable partition to change the shape of the free space and the use of the rooms, referring to the temporary activities, day and night.
In the 3 types of buildings the external edge or footprint does not change for the L or M type apartments building. In the Urban Villa the layout is managed by a furniture block which collects, organizes the space, changing its role.
In the Section building the external edge is a buffer zone for the surface changes. In the Tower Building the edge of the facade changes referring the dimension of the apartments using the balcony space. The internal moveable partition could be made in different materials, curtains, panels or other shape, texture and dimensions.