City within a City

Instructor: Jorge Pizarro
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia 
Term: Spring 2019


The intent for the housing complex is to show a density of spacial typologies within a limited urban context. Four stacked landscapes — an urban parking lot, a floor of urban housing, a suburban street, and a rural farm — form independent ecosystems stacked on top of one another, maintaining the true phenomenological experience of each individual place. Each place acts as an individual system in a complex machine. 

Questions as drivers of the project are engaged as such: Can the idealized American quality of life be maintained as population densities increase? Preparing for this inevitability before such increases in density take place? What role will nature, comprehensively, play in such an increase in density in an urban context?

Is not the issue here ‘urban rural’ and subsequently ‘suburban rural’ literally and metaphorically the concept of ‘urban rural’: creating the phenomenological atmosphere of a rural site within an urban place. The concept of allowing one ground to arrange nature on numerous levels acts as both a continuation of the Places provides multi-level public and private space as an extension to existing public spaces. At ground level it serves the Downtown Mall and Charlottesville’s downtown life. At the second level, it uses density of comparable heights to the neighboring parking garage to remain grounded in site but non directly within the house and landscape raise above the city to achieve views unencumbered of the site; rolling hills at the edge create a feeling of an endless plateau above the city.