Sant'Agabio Complex / Novara social housing

Renaturing an abandoned military area

Brief: "Creation of social housing of different typologies"

Concept of the project: "Social housing project accompanied by shopping center and school"

2014 / Progettazione dell'architettura

Promoter:

Politecnico di Milano

Location:

Novara

Lombardia, Italy

This project ensures the basic living requirements, 3 housing typologies and some public areas.

To organize all the elements inside the required area, we use those proposed by Kevin Lynch in ‘The image of the city’.

We take into account the natural and urban BORDERS that delimit the parcel; after this we divide it into 4 zones or DISTRICTS thanks to the hierarchy of AXES, the principal and the transversal and secondary,  leaving in the NODES all the public places, such as the school and the mall, being the houses the MILESTONES; this way we ensure a hierarchy.

In order to hold the biggest number of kinds of residents, we propose 3 different typologies of houses (40m2, 60m2 and 80m2), that are organized in height from smaller to larger areas, being the larger houses on the top floors.