HOUSING BLOCK
Designed by ahylo studio in collaboration with O25 Architects
Design team: Pavlos Xanthopoulos, Ioulietta Zindrou, Antonis Perpatidis, Tania Tzima, Nastazia Spyropoulou
Location: Moscow | Russia
Competition: A101 | The City Block Concept
Gross Floor Area: 15.300 sqm
Year: 2010

The housing Block is organized by using four apartment types, designed in a way that all share the same mathematical proportions and each performs as a subdivision or enclosure of the others. This four types appear in different orientations and scales. This fractal logic of the apartment distributions offers many possible rearrangements and re-subdivisions of the same building outline, and applies to all scales, from unit (apartment), to sets of units (block) and finally to the larger scale of the city (sets of blocks). As a result, local apartment arrangements generate unique housing blocks that share the same inherent design rules. From a real estate point of view, this flexibility allows for solutions of various design qualities and therefore of various budgets.
On the ground level along the highway, we propose a hard commercial boundary. The rest of the ground level keeps a semi-public character with parking spaces and gardens, oriented only for the inhabitants. Both the landscape below the apartments level and the planted terraces distributed in-between the apartments function as semi-public spaces that clearly filter the boundaries between semi-public – public and semi-public – private accordingly.