Jujuy 2056

Concrete zig-zagging balconies redefine Rosario’s high-rise urban density 

The vertical apartment building or so-called PH [Horizontal Property] is maybe the most intellectually underestimated architectural program in Argentina, an uncanny combination of both speculative private development and the constraints of an over subdivided urban grid that provides very narrows plots for actual interventions. A major percentage of the city continues to be built in this monotonous framework.

Actively responding to market demands of product differentiation and novelty, the project explores the problem of vertical repetition. The local context, by contrast, rarely engages stacking as a potential for structural change or invention. Instead, Jujuy 2056 is organized according to three integrated repetitive systems — slab, glazing, and enclosure — that operate at different scales to produce a unique spatial organization. Continuous two-meter concrete slabs generate continuity between the horizontal layers while extending and folding up or down the balcony plane (which the building code allows as an expansion of the slab) towards the next following floor. This extended piece acts as a cantilevered beam supporting the flying portion of the slab while the vertical surface is repeated and inverted as part of the building armature. The resulting structure is a stable vertical variation that departs from repetition though keeping relatively equal floor plans.

On the last two levels, the project recedes (due to building code and maximum height regulations), which provided us the opportunity to take on a compositional problem overlooked within this building typology. Locating the elevator tower and water supply tank there (usually placed onto the roof as a formal aggregate) generated space for smaller duplex apartments to be accessed via the terrace. Thus the systematic implementation of diagonals on oblique, incremental trajectories towards the interior of the building engenders an intensive spatial activity that continuously folds and oscillates.