Scope: Archasm Co-Living Competition
Collaborator: Garrett McGill
Year: 2020
Tools: Rhino | VRay | Photoshop | Storytelling
Recognition: 2nd Place Archasm Prize

 The way we live can again become hyper-local, like the city of yesterday, while our work remains internationally connected. In this scheme we hope to recapture the “dynamic field” of community connections only fostered in a city fragment.

Challenging the current fabric of hilltop, single-family mansions in rural Santa-Clara, this project acts as a catalyst for a community of creative and authentic production. Modeled after urban fragments seen in Italy (namely Rome and Padua) but with a contemporary, Californian zest; the project fosters an interlaced, changeable, open system of varied-sized apartments, studios, and workplaces to foster entrepreneurial, artistic, digital, and design work. The community allows for mutual support in their free and creative endeavors.

To work anywhere, but to be inspired locally.

LANDSCAPE

Planted as a successional landscape, a restored grassland and oak savanna with indigenous flora offers a dynamic and evolving experience. The Santa Clara Valley native landscape of oaks groves, foothill pines and woodlands offer rich textures to be experienced differently over time. The community will witness subtle stages of growth across the site while diverse ecologies reinforce an ethos of land stewardship. A sequence of landscapes; plateau gardens emerge from grassland restoration, a hillside permaculture orchard is the backdrop to a valley overlook and education space, a native tree nursery shades open air dining for the nearby market hall, while a landform bleacher serves as an exhibition terrace.

TYPOLOGY OF SPACES

The 4-6 storey fabric gives over ample space to living and working. The strategy which brings the two together is a system of interpretive community spaces. The furnished social hallways split offices and living quarters and serve as a public living room for meetings as well as community events. Further, each building has a generous community balcony which allows for inter-connection of workshop, office, and business work on all levels of the buildings.

CITY IS IN THE COMMUNITY

The city used to be the palace of the strange; a “dynamic field of interrelated forces...mutually independent variables in a rapidly expanding, infinite series.” In this scheme we hope to recapture some of the possible complexities which the city once offered and bring them to a community of people in the suburban context. The trend of gentrification and suburbanization was seen early by Jane Jacobs noting “diversity is crowded out by the duplication of success,”. Unhindered, the market replicates that which is established to be profitable, but this does not leave room for the creative constructions which are bred in the intercourse of the complex systems of the city. Spaces must be made for the community and profits must be hung for vital communities.