THE TREE // Hulme Community Space
Community Living Space
The Hulme Community Space is a place of growth whose masterplanning has been informed by the mistakes made in the past (namely Hulme Crescents). It prioritises safety and adequate privacy, so rather than forcing interactions by blending the private spaces with the public spaces, they are natural. This increases their chances of success Private and community are starkly defined and do not mix. The Tree is one of the twenty-one living units of the proposed Hulme Community Space Its form, materiality and structure have been carefully designed to contribute to the growth of the individual clients (the family of four: Natalia, Javier, Guillermo and Anita), the community (in this case, the twenty-one families residing in the space) and the wider community (the people living in the Mancunian district of Hulme). After studying how the local area currently works, as well as the mistakes made when designing Hulme Crescents and our precedent, we came up with a masterplan as a group. This experience allowed me to become more conscious of urban dynamics and their relevance when responding to a residential design brief Auri Natalia Gómez Olavarría // Manchester School of Architecture // THE TREE Hulme Community Space The aim of my design is to allow for my users, a family of four with two small children, to live in sync with the community and the wider local context. This is by incorporating a treebased philosophy in which my users are at the trunk and the social circles are at the branch and root area. The children will grow in a house that will be designed to connect the wider urban context (e.g. Hulme, Manchester) and the local community living space We were all given a plot to design our individual units on. Each of them has varying features both in relation to site conditions (e.g. noise, sights, sunlight exposure, etc.) but also the community space itself (e.g. how close the plot is to the playground, the café or a community garden). Based on the site requirements and the Community Statement outlined at the start, as well as precedents and history of the area, we came up with an urban planning solution to the challenge posed by the brief. Our iterations amounted to this: our final masterplan.