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2022

MCHAP

San Marino II Social Housing

Ana Elvira Vélez Villa

Carepa, Colombia

October 2020

PRIMARY AUTHOR

Ana Elvira Vélez Villa

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

1. Francesco M Orsini, Sebastián Serna Gómez, Juan Pablo Giraldo Mesa, Lina Durango Giraldo, Manuela Castillo Marín, Juliana Ramírez Jaramillo, Mónica López Villa , Isaac Ramírez Marín, Jaime Osorio Valencia, Andrés Moncada Mejía, Margarita Uribe Posada, Juan Cardona Ortega, Andrés Ramírez Muriel, Tatiana Cano López, ORGANIZACIÓN EDYFICA S.A., VIECO INGENIERÍA DE SUELOS S.A.S, 8. JOSE JAVIER JARAMILLO MONSALVE,7. ARIZA FORESTALES S.A.S, , 6. JOSE ALVARO TOBÓN – DISEICO, LUISA MARGARITA ESTRADA

CLIENT

COMFAMA & FUNDAUNIBAN

PHOTOGRAPHER

Isaac Ramirez Marin

OBJECTIVE

San Marino II seeks to consolidate a living habitat with a natural green environment that dignifies 102 houses and its complementary services.
Intermediate spaces are additional and inseparable spaces of the housing solution that allow a clear and fluid transition between the domestic domain and the more public space. In this case pocket parks and porch-patio houses built up the design.

Pocket Parks
A sequence of pocket parks is proposed to complement the residential arrayed houses, with diverse native tree species, gardens and water channels, thus bringing life between the houses with meeting areas, playgrounds an local shops.
Data: 16.5 m² of public space/inhabitant and 180 trees (1.7 tree/house).

Houses with porch and patio:
The identity of the houses are given by the sloping roof with wooden blinds, the patios and the access porch with concrete bench. These characteristics build the physical identity of the neighborhood but at the same time guarantee the thermal comfort of the interior, the flexibility of expansion according to the needs of each family and the extension of the social areas through the porches.
All these three intermediate elements, sloping roofs, patios and porch are part of cultural identity of the tropical architecture.

CONTEXT

Location: the tropics
Carepa with 33,000 inhabitants is located in the northwestern corner of South America in the geographical area of Urabá. It is a complex and diverse territory with high levels of biodiversity, where the main lines of the economy are banana production and extensive cattle ranching.

Stakeholders:
FundaUniban is one of the most important foundations in the sector, committed to improving the quality of life of the workers of the Colombian international trading company UniBan, and Comfama is a private, autonomous social enterprise, which also seeks to improve the quality of life of workers and their families by offering different types of services and benefits in education, employment, recreation, health, credit, housing subsidies and others.
Fundauniban, invites Comfama for the management and development of the San Marino project which was the second stage of a social housing project.

Situation:
The urban and demographic growth of the Urabá region in recent years has been one of the largest in the national territory, where rapid implementation initiatives are focused in the efficiency of housing as a product, regardless of its functionality, or its relationship with its context.
It is in this tropical territorial context, with stakeholders seeking a better life for the families, that the intermediate space design strategy is applied to conceive San Marino II social housing.

PERFORMANCE

With more than a year inhabited by the 102 families, we have found that despite the fact that most of the houses have made an extension in their backyards (70%), the identity of the neighborhood is maintained in a forceful way, since the extensions maintain the brick material, the type of fenestration and the continuity of the roof.
However, the most surprising thing is the appropriation of the front gardens, and the collective spaces by the families by taking care of the plants and tress and embellishing the place even more.

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