Teatros: Growing House

Challenging the existing vision for the Avenida, U-TT pushed to include a more complex program, through the suggestion of additional programs for each site. One feature of the larger Avenida Lecuna project, the Teatros building, provides important social services for the neighborhood in an innovative aggregation of functions.

Varied programming is mixed together and includes a kindergarten, public health clinics, sport facilities, retail, art spaces, and governmental agencies. The activities are overlapped, layered and linked within the buildings and throughout the Avenida.

For the largest site, we connected a housing block directly to Teatros metro station by bridging over the avenue, directly linking housing and infrastructure.  The additional space we gained with the bridge allowed us to accommodate a bakery, print company, radio station, auditorium, library, exhibition spaces, bar, sports field, swimming pool and rooftop chapel in the project.

For the framework of the tower, we reinvented the modernist housing type by linking residential units to flexible production spaces, which become realized as a stack of public spaces spiraling up through the building.  This is an adoption of a barrio typology in which streets are an extension of the home, in which housing units and public productive areas interlace into one body.