Workshop: Juan Herreros | A Playground for Digital Nomads

Productive Residential Towers

Workshop leader Juan Herreros (Estudio Herreros)

Workshop assistant Pedro Pitarch

Project location Madrid, Spain

Team Gabriel Barba (Peru), Andrés Melo (Colombia), Brittany Siegert (United States

Duration Five days

About the Program

“Productive Residential Towers” is a research program that aims to reassess the models for thinking and designing contemporary collective housing, particularly within the context of social, economic, health, and climate crises in our cities. The proposal seeks to address the demand to regenerate and requalify urban areas for new types of citizens with more creative, engaged, and demanding lifestyles, diverging from conventional norms.

It focuses on areas of opportunity, especially on tall office buildings gradually being abandoned. These buildings require a diversification of their program and reintegration into the urban fabric that rejects monofunctional zones. Additionally, it aims to meet the growing demand for productive activities in the city by eliminating industrial ghettos and promoting the integration of contemporary production into residential neighbourhoods.

Objectives

The main subject of the course is Project Techniques, their methodologies and resources. For this, the research takes as starting data “realistic” the apparently utopian and radically propositional conceptions that can be understood as viable proposals of high novelty. It is about proposing something new but produced with the naturalness that accompanies the ideas necessary for their opportunism.

The objective is to create a state of collective reflection of a continuous and coincident character in which any type of contribution -documentary, written, oral, graphic...- has meaning, accumulating a quantity of material ready to be shared. Given the urgency of the workshop, the material produced must be of maximum communicative capacity as architectural documents.

Task

The exercise consisted of transforming an iconic building in Madrid, originally used for offices, into a Productive Residential Tower. The building was the Picasso Tower, designed by Minoru Yamasaki.

Workshop: Juan Herreros | A Playground for Digital Nomads