Strategic design for the urban block of Buenos Aires

The City of Buenos Aires lies on a regular grid of square blocks, following the traditional ‘Law of Indies’. Due to large immigration waves from Europe during the 20th century, the city went through a very rapid densification process leading to constant changes in the building regulations to meet housing needs. Therefore, the city is currently composed by a mix of buildings responding to all different regulations, resulting in a very irregular urban landscape. By contrast, the current building regulation proposes an extremely regular model, by limiting buildable heights according to zoning and plot dimensions.

This project is a simulation-based study that explores the environmental performance of the ‘irregular’ actual built form and the ‘regular’ model following current building regulations. It proposes an effective 'generic' morphological model for the redesign of the current urban block, engaging in reducing energy consumption per block and with a special focus on outdoor comfort, to be applied in the growth of low and mid-density blocks.