Barrio

Fall 2022 • in collaboration with Isa Restrepo • under direction of Prof. Marcos Parga

Producing pockets of Puerto Rico in the Bronx.

Just as vernacular Puerto Rican casitas spring up throughout the gardens of Melrose, barrio cre ates flexible spaces for this particular type of gathering and cultural expression. In these shared spaces, neighborhood residents are seen sharing food, dancing, and any other facets of what may preserve the idea of home from hundreds of miles away. It’s an act of taking back parts of the city and revitalizing them to make the city feel more like home. barrio aims to give the city access to this space typology without the risk of being displaced. A system of casita spaces are established throughout a primary 30ft ^3 grid. Standardized units on a secondary 10ft^3 grid become the building blocks for endless permutations of space distribution with the agency of those inhabiting. The middle floor of each vertical 10ft^3 grid is reserved for negotation between the inhabitants of the top and bottom floor. This negotiable space allows the space to adapt with the changes that might occur within a household, such as a child moving away for college or the moving in of relatives immigrating from abroad, and encourages interaction between people who might have otherwise remained strangers. The permanence of the primary 30ft^3 grid is expressed with a dominating concrete materiality and the ephemeral moving parts allow for informal adjustment of space with lighter cross laminated timber panels. The framework not only evokes a need to fill, but also creates a lighter spatial language sensitive to the surrounding context.