Community Canopy

A soul does not exist without the solid foundation of their past family and community. A family and a community are the roots that support an individual throughout life. Thus, through the metaphor of a family tree, this project aims to connect the living and their past relatives to form an overarching community.

This project is a social housing project that also features a cemetery and urban beekeeping. Even though a cemetery and urban beekeeping appear immensely separate, both have the commonality of being the essential roots that support us. Without the pollination that bees provide, humanity would not be able to survive. Similarly, without our past relatives, no one would be alive today. Thus, these two programming features are placed in the structure that holds up the social housing units. Also, for some of the cemetery niches, a tree is rising through up to the ground level illustrating that our past relatives are the roots that our society has flourished from. Thus, these aspects support the people who will be living in the housing complex of the project.

Finally, the last critical aspect of this project is to impute important community spaces throughout as a community is our crucial second support system to sustain our lives. Thus, with each housing level exists large public areas that intertwine with a double-loaded circulation system, which allows for occupants to have a connection with their neighbors resulting in a stronger community foundation. Also, this layout of units allows for more light to populate both sides of the unit and achieves cross ventilation of the units, which is necessary due to the climate of Barcelona. 

 Thus, by creating these vast public spaces that arise from the support of our relatives and urban beekeeping, which are two key aspects that are the foundation of humanity, this project aims to illustrate modern humanity is only the canopy of the many roots that grew before.