Research

  • Housing: The Necessary Redensification of Social Housing in Mexico
  • GRANTEE
    Miquel Adrià
    GRANT YEAR
    2019

Del Territorio al Habitante, self-construction project for INFONAVIT / CIDS. With 128 Arquitectura, Mexico, 2019.

It's popularly known that a dense and compact city is more efficient than a dispersed city. Cities increase in size mainly through two mechanisms: they densify or expand, grow vertically or horizontally. This project investigates possible alternatives of social housing that can offer different solutions for people who lost their homes in Mexico after the 2017 earthquakes. It is necessary to generate a stock of ideas and proposals that could potentially be replicable on a large scale. Assuming that extensive growth has been a failure, and that land is the most valuable and scarce resource of the city, it is essential to manage land for the benefit of society. Projects will be proposed as a first step to offer the real estate market typologies that improve the obsolete housing models of social interest currently in place. Ultimately, this work may lead to a publication or exhibition.

Miquel Adrià is a Mexico City-based architect, with graduate studies from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, and with a PhD from Universidad Europea de Madrid. He is currently dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at CENTRO University and also serves as Cultural Adviser to the Mayor of Mexico City. He is the editor in chief of Arquine, Architecture International Magazine and the author of forty books about Mexican and Latin American contemporary architecture, for other editorials such as GG, Electa, Arquine, Phaidon. Adrià has served as a juror for the World Architecture Festival, and as curator for the 2012 Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and at the Shenzhen Biennale in 2013. He is also editorial counselor for Domus 2020 (with David Chipperfield) and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Seoul 2021 Architecture Biennale, chaired by Dominique Perrault.