Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

On the first floor of the subsidised housing complex, the facades are screened by continuous terraces and projecting
balconies on the upper storey that are overlooked by the living spaces. Sunbreakers are used to create more privacy.
different finishes for the walls: plaster for the horizontal
buildings, and exposed brick for the patio houses. All the
horizontal buildings face south for greater sun exposure, and
offer views over the surrounding countryside.
Amaca’s subsidised housing optimally differentiates, with
just a few clever design elements, a residential type whose
nature does not allow for much compositional creativity. For
example, in order to increase privacy in the apartment blocks,
the firm designed a series of sunbreakers that screen the
continuous terraces overlooked by the living spaces. On the
upper storeys, the terraces become balconies, varying the
continuity of the facades, and some of the south-facing
apartments feature small, covered roof terraces rising above
the roof – a feature typical of Venetan architecture. Every
apartment has its own character, avoiding the usual
homogeneity of this kind of speculative building.
The layout of the row of residential buildings nearest the
countryside is more complex. Here, two units of five terrace
houses each cover 4,017 square metres (43,239 square feet).
The first three houses of each unit have the same
distributional and volumetric layouts, with internal patios
and gardens at the front connected by a small pergola-covered
walkway. The layout of the fourth houses mirrors that of the
first three, while the houses on the outer edges of each unit
are single storey, with a patio that opens to the countryside.
For this residential complex, Amaca started out with a local
scheme for the row house with a north–south arrangement,
3 to 4 metres (9.8 to 13 feet) of garden to the front, a 7-metre
(23-foot) deep housing body and a back garden. This layout had
the obvious problems of an introverted floor plan and limited
privacy. However, the introduction of a small interior patio
creates greater sun exposure and an intimate space screened
by the sunbreakers on the windows of the houses opposite.
The entrances were resolved by modulating the volumes of the
facades, which are visually connected by an exposed-brick
continuous base. The brick base also generates shared
courtyards at the front of the buildings, where garage
entrances alternate with the entrances to the houses, set in
recessed niches. Likewise, in the subsidised building units, the
first storey of the houses is a parallelepiped volume (the
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