Life in the gap

Architectural Review, The, July, 1994 by Raymund Ryan

The disastrous earthquake of 1985 left large numbers of Mexico's vast population homeless and certain sectors of infrastructure, particularly in the shanty towns, inoperable. The Brasil apartment building, conceived by Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, is a small but articulate response to this housing crisis, an architectural idea both about providing citizens with a place to live and the healing of physical gaps within the city itself. Financed by Infonavit, a trade union fund, the units are rationally reduced to an affordable essence, clean simple spaces awaiting the habitation of the individual or family group. Norten's response is typological without being historicist -- his architecture is a measured gesture in collectivity.

The Zocolo is Mexico City's physical and emotional heart, its focus and origin. Typically, the building blocks of the Zocolo cluster together in Hispanic colonial proximity, their claustrophobic intensity brilliantly released into the broad stone void of the city's principal square. There stand the principal monuments of the nation, the president's palace and the earthquake-damaged cathedral. These present flat monumental walls to the great urban room of the plaza. Norten's building on the street named Brasil makes a subsidiary excavation into the contiguous mass, slicing into the fabric to form a modest room which is in scale with its surroundings and which opens out to the passers-by.

The new apartment building infiltrates an empty lot in the metropolis' dense and ancient Downtown. Fortifying the edges of his site with parallel bars of accommodation, Norten has left a long central chasm lined by functional walkways, open to the elements. The new linear space is at right angles to the city's street and across from a small public square. Norten's internal world is a hard canyon of a patio from which all units are accessed. For the entrance floor, a striking contrast is set up between its almost geological walls and the vivid sky above, between the constrained and the free.

Informed as much by the architectural discourse of Culver City as by that of Milan, Norten's Brasil compound is formed by two parallel bars of unequal length. Only the longer of these, together with the severe interstitial gap, presents itself to the street. From the pavement, the abrupt cross section of the accommodation units is masked by a lower box, internally open to the sky, used to screen gas, electrical and water supply equipment. Strong vertical slots in the stone flanks of this substitute entry pavilion have some geometric affinity with the metal of the gate assemblage. At this threshold from the crowded outer world, the inner slot is of industrial silence, with as yet barely visible balconies.

On the street, the white stone box within the more heavily encrusted surroundings already signals the presence of a contemporary wall. Past it, a long body of mesh-screened construction nestles deep into the plan, the gash's other face initially formed by the crumbling plaster-on-brick flank of the eighteenth-century Church of St Catherine. First the whiteness of the doubly exposed pavilion, then most potently the stark contrast beyond (between the new facade and the old sidewall) -- incite a haptic and aesthetic energy. with its decaying morphology of stranded planes. The inherited or found construction is in dialogue with the new -- much as the elements of Alvaro Siza's Sao Victor public housing in Porto themselves were in the 1970s.

Each unit of Norten's social housing is simply a few rectangular rooms leading from one to the next. The longer run has four individual units on each of its three floors with combined kitchen/bathroom service stacks pushing into an interstitial void along the edge of the property. Across from it, two orthodox units are neatly tacked behind that older church which already framed the entrance. Plugging the new street at this far end is one particularised apartment per floor, the plan of which is formed by its boundary condition and the desire to tie the bipartite scheme on the upper levels. All 21 units have utilitarian balconies behind an immediate access to the catwalk system in front.

It is this ambulatory circuit, together with the space between, which is the memorable architectural move. Of the two raw edges, that on the longer side billows forward to pinch the communal court towards its centre where a cantilevered concrete stair connects with linking bridges at all three levels. Above, a gantry allows for water distribution from roof stores. In section, the apartments sit above artisan's studios -- slightly raised off the communal street -- and then semi-buried basements, confirming a sense of horizontal rather than vertical extrusion. The longer building has continuous metal barrel-vaulted roof with correspondingly shaped ceilings whereas the shorter block has small barrel vaults perpendicular to the main axis.

Screening the galley corridor when seen obliquely, the mesh opens up when viewed frontally on to a bleak palette of fair-faced blockwork, square windows, dark pipes and, above, public lighting on projecting armatures. Decorative finishes are necessarily kept to a minimum and the dwellings resist any attempt at cosy articulation. With the least amount of light, the studios are a magazine of garage-type interiors terminating at the back of the lot -- as in the indigenous vecindad without formal release. This new addition to Mexico's architectural culture is marked by rationality and flair -- it awaits evolving layers of human habitation.