This project was a finalist in the international competition Social Distancing Housing Block, which aimed to generate responses for new dwelling models through creative architectural designs and feasible innovation. The brief called for alternative housing models that would challenge the real estate market in a scenario of prolonged social distancing.

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Sheer 26 is a four-level urban block for a post-pandemic era, displaying 26 double-occupancy cylindrical units, a community-driven ground floor, and a rooftop vegetable garden to encourage sustainability of up to 52 homeless dwellers.

 

Transformable sheer-Units and occupants’ personae shape the block. The unit configuration echoes the multiple faces of the homeless, their intrinsic rules, and ways of living by offering variations that welcome the dreamer, the neat freak, the gardener, the sartorialist, the musician, the graffiti artist, and the dog lover, to name a few possible characters. 

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Sheer-U is a self-structured compact home, partially, fully or completely enclosable through manipulation of its translucent folding skin, a sheltering sheer that can be dematerialized or even disappear, reminding dwellers they control how they want to live.

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The Sheer-ful living concept unfolds through habitat transformations, generating a sculptural setting by rotating units along the vertical wet area axis, conforming contrasting volumes, experiential spaces, and voids that animate the streetscape as tenants’ relationship with space, things, and people are revealed.

In a scenario of prolonged social distance, it creates an environment where people can interact in new ways, beyond the physical proximity, exploring other senses – visual, auditory, olfactory – disrupting housing conventions.

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The project is featured on the Non-Architecture webpage