Este artículo estudia tres proyectos de investigación-acción participativa, en los que los investigadores han colaborado con comunidades que viven en barriadas de viviendas sociales en Londres. El documento presenta primero el contexto de la regeneración de la vivienda social en Londres, proporcionando tanto un contexto histórico como la discusión de los debates actuales. Luego, explica el enfoque metodológico y los tres casos de estudio: William Dunbar y William Saville Community Plan, Alton Estate People’s Plan y Trellick and Edenham Community Plan. Estos casos se refieren a barriadas de viviendas sociales donde los residentes se enfrentaban a la demolición de sus hogares u otro tipo de desarrollo de densificación en su vecindario y donde las comunidades locales no estaban incluidas en el proceso de toma de decisiones. A través de estos proyectos de investigación-acción participativa, los investigadores y las comunidades trabajaron en conjunto en el diseño de una visión liderada por la comunidad para su área: un Plan Popular o un Plan Comunitario. A partir del estudio de estos casos, el documento analiza el proceso para establecer estas colaboraciones y el impacto que pueden tener tanto en las comunidades locales como en debates más amplios (en la teoría y en la práctica) sobre la regeneración de la vivienda social, la participación y la planificación dirigida por la comunidad.
This article examines the intermediate space as a support for collective life in housing cooperatives built in Montevideo during the 1970s. It studies how spatial operations: active thresholds, habitable pathways, and shared uses; configure an architecture of encounter between the private and the common. Drawing on a genealogy that connects courtyard houses, tenements, and modern housing, three cases from the Uruguayan cooperative system (VICMAN, AFAF 3, and CUTCSA I) are analyzed through a methodology that combines morphological study, on-site observation, and comparative diagrams. These diagrams help identify patterns and establish links between diverse design strategies. The intermediate space is not conceived as a functional leftover, but as a social infrastructure that sustains communal life. The research also incorporates the category of edge, understood as an interface between housing complex and city, crucial for assessing urban porosity. As a disciplinary contribution, the paper argues that cooperative housing, in its spatial and participatory dimensions, offers valid lessons for rethinking collective dwelling. In a present marked by social fragmentation, urban loneliness, and housing crisis, these experiences do not provide replicable models but sensitive principles for designing proximity, relationships, and shared care.
Ridolfi built a nursery school in Ivrea, carving out space between existing buildings to create a mini community where children could recognize their school space as something distinct. The design process involved five versions between 1955 and 1961. Based on archival documentation, our own images, and analytical drawings of the design process and the completed work, we have analyzed the reasons behind the project: the needs of children, nature as part of the educational program, the diversity of spaces for activities and games, the search for alternatives in the network of circulation among the different parts, the creation of a world of its own for children through architecture, the dialogue with the pre-existing built environment and the natural one, and the versatility of the construction system. Two conclusions are worth highlighting. The first is the architect's attention to the world of children and the fundamental role that nature plays in that world. The second is the understanding, based on the above, of the architect's working method in this particular project and revealing an open and unpredictable spatial, formal, and material system that explores the contingent nature of the design process.
In the work of A&P Smithson, there is always an imaginative impulse, one with enough freedom and strength to propose forms that break away from preconceived or deterministic ideas, yet informed by influences that, interconnected in an open and fluid manner, they called idea-seeds. This concept not only speaks to their inventive capacity but also defines a working method, as these idea-seeds ultimately crystallize into group-forms: configurations that can evolve, refine themselves, and serve as foundations for future projects. This paper examines the Headmaster's House as the synthesis of multiple overlapping idea-seeds: the hall as a way of life, its form as a direct result of technical and constructive capabilities, the pursuit of greater formal legibility, and an interest in prefabrication and standardization. With the Headmaster's House, the Smithsons conceived an archetype, one that would become the basis for their ongoing explorations, continuously generating new models.
