Prefabrication experiments - 402 - Aqueduct House

 

Service circulation is a multifaceted and unavoidable part of building construction often studied too simplistically when designing industrialized building systems. Except for service cores which integrate disparate technical elements in a manufactured hub or pod, strategies for networking services over multiple homes or types is limited; Off-site construction using mechanical pods is habitually applied to distinct constructions.  Multi storey dwelling blocks usually use similar core principles to stack multiple apartments' kitchens or baths to rationalize piping through vertical chases. Scaling or imagining these practices for civil infrastructure could lead to more efficiently sharing amenities and a more integrated approach to community planning including standardized and shareable schemes. 

 

Servicing dwellings cost-effectively becomes particularly critical in contexts where facilities and their democratization are sparse, at best. Developing countries facing housing crises or building in remote locations require concepts that make allotment of power and water supply or disposal the basic framework of community planning. 

 

Alejandro Aravena's Elemental practice has made sharing universally resilient housing designs based on combining industrialized and low-teck solutions a staple of multiple proposals. Perhaps, best known for their Villa Verde scheme in Chile where occupants could personalize half of a core-dwelling prototype, the firm has deployed similar adaptable principles for larger housing tracts. Their ambitious speculative proposal, Aqueduct House, suggests civil engineering elements, sidewalks and paths, to equip a linear urban plan:  A sidewalk and a first-floor girder span multiple lots as box beams or caissons forming a continuous duct line and a common support system. The reinforced concrete tubes channel mechanical elements across divided parcels to align a band of flexible townhouse spaces.  Demising rectangular concrete columns indicate property lines and support the concrete beam onto which other urban elements such as lighting can be connected. 

 

As in most other core housing prototypes, occupants play a major role in the construction of their dwellings, their evolution, and their community development. The brutalist overhead conduit is proposed as an assembly of modular concrete elements; a type of kit-of-parts civil power bar that could be set up and branched out in any context.

Elemental's Aqueduct House proposal