As part of an investigation of new urban typologies I am undertaking as part of TeamHelsinki for the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 competition, I came across this scheme by the Mexican architectural practice Productora, on DomusWeb [via Dezain, inevitably]
This scheme, created for the competition from Arpafil, proposes floating an entire city block above the ground, in part of Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.
The proposal echoes Corb's urban utopian ideals, of letting the landscape flow around and beneath the built form. But here it is also a programmatic and organisational tactic:
To be able to create new quality public areas in the city, we decided to elevate one of the city building blocks. The new ‘floating’ building provides the City of a new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media: a complementary new department of the University which is distributed through the historical centre. The elevated urban block allows us … (1) to create a new reference point in the monotonous and isotropic urban structure (2) to establish a dialectic relation between the historical plaza and the newly created public plaza (3) create views (´new perspectives´) over the very horizontal texture of the existing city - establishing a relation with existing monuments such as the Cathedral. We believe that the city of Guadalajara needs powerful interventions in the neighbourhoods surrounding the actual centre of the City, to convert the city from a uni-central into a pluri-central urban network. The new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media could be a first step into this development.
More at Productora's website.