Urban Living Rooms

The area extension, its nearness to the city centre make this place an exceptional site, from where to start a recoil in planning the expansion of the city. This way the city becomes enriched in new highly-standardized residential areas, together with spaces, facilities and resources headed in the cultural and recreational activities both of the whole urban community, and of a large amount of tourists and users of Lettish sectors of excellence.

Urban Living Rooms is principally meant to point out a strategic approach to the indicated subject, able to read the specific environmental conditions and economic dynamics, but at the same time the project wishes to prime a wide range of cultural, social and economic processes.
A similar approach aims to retrace, with a wide spectrum, the whole area in question and the nearest zones (which stands for the required flexibility of a long-term project), by means of environmental sustainability criteria, architectural sensitivity and multi-functional uses of the site, able to favour social exchanges and a tuneful relationship with nature.
Such a strongly characterized intervention of town planning, together with sustainable architecture, will enable the involved operators (inhabitants, the public administration, property developers and architects) to cooperate in a wide-ranging operation of urban marketing, stimulating interest at both a national and international level.

In Urban Living Rooms the relationship between architecture and landscape is placed at the very centre of the project.
As a matter of fact, we reckon that the problem to solve is not exclusively a problem of town planning over an extensive area, but of landscape designing of the territory where natural and artificial elements will merge together, as commensurable matters, to originate a recognizable sign.
That new landscape generates a strong identity from the intervention and the place in question, so as to become the very landmark of the territory.

The project area turns into a continuous equipped park, where recreational and cultural activities, for leisure time, coexist with the residential function An irregular, polygonal matrix is taken as a mediation system between the organic, fractioned places of natural evidences and a more rational, necessary frame of a urban settlement. That matrix becomes a net of routes and crossings capable to arrange the movements and the activities inside the project area, while it spreads as a net over the closest areas (i.e. the forest, the lakefront, the present fringe of deteriorated zones), putting them into a system.

Urban Living Rooms consists of a sequence of gathered spaces, generated by the polygonal matrix, which arrange and interrelate pubblic and private areas, accomodating activities and functions which change according to their position in the respect of the distinctive features of the area: Juglas Iela west urban fringe, the forest-screened south-east fringe and the east fringe facing the lake.