Social Living. An Experimental Project of tall building in Bolzano (Italy)

Social housing has always been an important topic of research in Italy since the post-war period. Starting from the Fanfani plan to the recent laws on social housing, there has been a constant and uninterrupted research within the architectural project. Each historical period has produced buildings in line with the thought of their time and has led to a variety of housing types that, however, have not always coincided with a high quality of life within the housing. The current pandemic crisis has only sharpened the approach that architects have increasingly used since the eighties, aimed at a formal and not structural use of technology, leaving unchanged some typological principles of housing and rewriting only the formal aspect. This approach implies a very precise thought of the project of social housing in which human activities were decomposed through a function and recomposed in monofunctional spaces, minimum, according to a “mechanistic” logic (spaces servants and served) to create housing. The recent pandemic has shown how the functionally designed spaces of our homes do not allow a mixed use and a direct relationship between the external and internal environment. The design of housing, specifically, is called (today more than ever) to translate the needs, an ecosystem of relationships between objects that refers to natural systems characterized by variability, diversity and redundancy, an interconnected structure and a capacity to "self-adapt". The project of social housing in a tall building, proposed for the company that manages social housing in Bolzano (Italy), suggest a different design system related to the use of a sustainable construction system, (such as load-bearing wooden walls for an earthquake-proof building in height -10 floors-), to the definition of "adaptive" tools for the organization of a space no longer based on the modernist logic of function but on the hybrid use of space, to a different relationship "inside-outside" in the configuration of the spaces of housing, and to the creation of collective spaces dedicated to the inhabitants’ community.