Five points towards a new architecture | 5 - Dense

Med in Italy is a unit of a dense residential complex, suitable for the shores of the Mediterranean Sea construction thanks to its bioclimatic, typological and formal characteristics. For the purposes of the Solar Decathlon Europe Competition, this module is designed to be able to operate as an autonomous housing unit, however, it is believed that this solution is not the best one, since in sharp contrast with the objective of land preserving from a widespread human settlement, which causes pollution, landscape wreck and difficulty in providing joints services to settled communities.

Med in Italy is therefore a cell of a larger and denser housing complex, which involves the construction of minimum expandable housing units, built around a compact kitchen-bath blocks, designed to accommodate various types of users. The horizontal aggregation of the modules gives rise to urban areas able to meet different types of housing demand, with a housing typology from 2 to 6 people. The horizontal aggregation of the modules gives rise to urban areas able to meet different types of housing demand, with a housing typology from 2 to 6 people. These built up areas can also be considered as holiday homes, for an ecological tourism, focusing on the respect for the environment and its exploitation, in a very attractive tourist context.

The aggregation of modules also in a vertical way, allows the planning of two or three floor buildings, they too intended as housing, tourist accommodation, or moreover as hotel offer.
In the latter case the aggregative flexibility involves also the interior, changing the central kitchen bathroom block of the module, which is replaced by a bath-bath block serving two bedrooms.
The internal flexibility besides module aggregation, also concerns a different system configuration of furnishings: in fact assuming the aggregation of housing units with a single block kitchen serving several bedrooms and by simplifying the furnishing system, it can give rise to “accommodation of first asylum”, to meet the demand of hospitality for political refugees, immigrants and refugees, more and more increasing and pressing on the North Mediterranean shores. This latter internal configuration also allows to imagine these houses as “emergency shelters” to be quickly implemented to support communities stricken by natural disasters in particular earthquakes, the Italian peninsula and many parts of the Mediterranean are unfortunately subject to.