DESIGN STUDIO 6.1 - 
NYCTOPHILLIC INHABITANCES
 

Following on from the Tears of a Dormant Catastrophe project, the scheme revisits the ambition of providing housing through infrastructure by assessing the existing ecological condition of Panama City via a survey tracking down from the Cerro Ancon hill to Pacific Ocean. The survey, treated as an appraisal of the current manifestation of the city, is then folded upon itself and distorted as a means of generating perennial architectural forms derived from exterior conditions. Compressed and encapsulated, the recalibrated survey is then situated along the banks of the Panama Canal interrogating the forgotten banks of the marshland, and refolded into a series of screened environmental enclosures that provide inhabitancy through the occupancy of shadows. A typological language centered around the series of dwellings proposes a network of civic spaces shared along with follies and pump houses that articulate the notion of a housing scheme for shadow workers, those working for the container yards along the canal. The screened condition of each architectural assemblage draws from its shadows as a means of deriving spatial provisions, informing the language of split-level arrangements and gradients of privacy designed in line with the environmental conditioning of exterior screens protecting from intense rain and wind loads.

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Taking the same structural profiles previously used as reference to a Panamanian vernacular, the isotropic framing conditions supporting each shelter allows for continual development in line with the housing demands, using the material strategy composed from surrounding availability to be occupied at a domestic scale that articulates the relationship between the denizen, the environment, and the architectural mediation between the two. As a split timber structure with steel reinforcements, each assemblage can be expressed as non-permanent structure capable of relocation, while the stone groundscapes, supported by retaining steel panels made from recycled container components, set up a permanent foundation along the canal that implements a permanent addition to the city's infrastructure with a network of buried hydroturbines that generate electricity from the traffic of the canal. Both the structural and environmental strategy were resolved through multiple meetings with engineering consultants, and helped informed the technical resolution of the scheme as rigorous appraisal of both the urban and ecological condition of the city.