Strategic design for the urban block of Buenos Aires - The current building regulations vs. the actual built form

Published in the proceedings of PLEA (Passive Low Energy Architecture), Hong Kong. 

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 paper is a simulation-based study that explores the environmental performance of the ‘irregular’ actual built form and the ‘regular’ model following current building regulations. The method consists of three main steps: firstly, the city’s urban layout is studied, identifying the most common block orientation. Secondly, analytic studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of typical ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ blocks. Lastly, a redesign for the current urban block is proposed, engaging in reducing energy consumption per block and focusing specially on outdoor variety and comfort. This results in an effective ‘generic’ morphologic model, to be applied in the growth of low and mid-density blocks.

Full article here.