Nabito shared with us their latest project for mixed uses, The Stairscraper, a horizontal skyscraper, designed to be in New York, which won the Total Housing Competition. It is currently on exhibit until the 22nd of January at the Store Front for Art and Architecture in New York City. More images and architect’s description after the break.
Contemporary housing is spreading into the more complex and (broad) concept of HABITAT.This housing project is impossible today without thinking of something much more complex, but simply the solution to meet a social need and right. In housing today, the motto “TOTAL HOUSING” seems justified. It represents the idea of understanding a wider habitat, a system of complex social relationships with the environment in search of enjoyment of life, mixing different ambits and different uses.
A habitat sensible to the singularities , designed for cultural exchange, uses, programs and activities in relation with work, communication and leisure. These human attitudes could not be more separate.The time of urban planning related to the division of time and space in 8h 8h 8h (hours for a tot m2 per person; time for work tot m2 per person, time for leisure tot m2 per person, time for the rest tot m2 per person) through which have been conceived modern cities with their standards, has given way during the last 15 years, to the possibility of a match to the activities between residential, recreational, educational, productive ,carried out in a 24-time continuum in which it is difficult to differentiate spaces for their activities.
It’s easy to say that in relation to the contemporary change in the space-time conditions, there is also a change in the structure of society and the peculiarity of mobility in an urban environment, a social space, which is more and more defined by cultural diversity and a multiplicity of attitudes and activities.
The work space becomes, for example, an open space to many other possibilities and activated in a productive and at the same time ludic time not necessarily restricted in a specific area (space-time) of the day. So the investigation of a “TOTAL HOUSING” can not be reduced to the study of some typologies of different and flexible as it can be, but rather should be extended to the environment of complicity with the urban complexity and complicity. Interior and exterior, intimate and social space, landscape and architecture, the habitat cellula and “his” sensitive relationship with the natural and urban environment at the same time.
Questioning the relationship between quality and quantity is the essence of this radical research. The Stairscraper is a real provocation on the possibility of extending the housing to a Total Habitat sensitive to individual needs in a collective whole. So the passage from the private cottages (no spaces social bookmarking) to social cottages, maintaining individual and intimate space is evident.
The Stairscraper is a superposition of individual singular garden houses with the same characteristic of the horizontal sprawl, but liberating the land and concentrating the uses and the energy. It is a social collective of individualities. The stairscraper is a complex 360 degree design that incorporates all kinds of common facilities and public spaces at different levels maintaining the intimacy of the individual space with the same quality.
Architects: Nabito Location: New York, USA Assigned Typology: Private Client: Confidential Assigned Task: Project design, site supervision, and security at design and execution Budget: Confidential Project phase: on going Collaborators: Teo Valli, Agita Putnina, Isidora Stecki, Sandra Stefanovic, Furio Sordini.
