El conventillo como tipología de vivienda en el centro histórico de Cuenca

Abstract

In last decades, Latin-Americans’ historic centers have been the center of public interventions in several urban problems, such as inner city slums, our study’s axis.

With this degree project, we aspire to study the tenement house as housing typology and collective living at Cuenca’s Historic Center, and develop an architectonic intervention draft in one of these houses, where all the actual tenants will be consider in the design, as our aim is to avoid gentrification.

For Cuenca’s reality, we define the tenement house, as the edification where many families live in small rental rooms organized through hallways and central courtyards, here the bathrooms and washing areas, are commonly used; furthermore several formal and informal community relationships are developed. In order to check up this reality in Cuenca, a tenement-house’s identification and verification was made, with this, we confirmed that there are 25 tenement houses in Gil RamírezDávalos and El Sagrario, Cuenca’s historic center parishes.

The study of Armijos House, our analysis tenement house, approached us to a reality where, many people find in these small rental rooms their answer for dwelling, in spite of the small rooms’ dimensions and the lack of wet areas. The tenement houses have some features such ascommunity bonds, sharing spaces and resources, spatial distribution through central cores and optimization of spaces and circulations; these co-housing principles could be replicated to improve and promote collective dwelling for Cuenca’s Historic Center addressed to the vulnerable population.