Bottom-up strategies are one way to address prevailing urban scarcities. Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and a national banking crisis that crippled the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Neglected for over a decade, in 2007 it became the improvised home for a community of over 1,000 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that many called a vertical slum.
U-TT began to research and document the physical and social organization of the tower, believing there was something valuable to learn from what the residents created in eight years of squatting. The community was neither a den of criminality, nor a romantic utopia. Rather, Torre David was a building that possessed the complexity of a city. It merged formal structure and informal adaptation to provide urgently needed solutions.In 2012, after a year of research, U-TT began to work with residents and a diverse team of collaborators to document the squatters’ adaptive reuse of the existing structure, interview residents about their experience, and design proposals to retrofit the tower complex. In particular, the sustainable engineers of the SuAT Chair at ETH Zürich helped develop novel circulatory, electrical, and water infrastructure schemes. While striving to raise funds to implement some of these ideas, the documentary and design work was disseminated in a book, short film, lectures, and numerous exhibitions.
In 2014, the Venezuelan government announced its intention to end the occupation and transform Torre David into a commercial center and office tower. The police evicted residents, relocating most families to a new social housing project located beyond the outskirts of the city. As of mid-2015, the future of Torre David is still uncertain.

Torre David

Buildings

Founded in 1945 as the ‘Museum of the Revolution’ marking the Partisans’ victory over Fascism, the modernist structure housing what is now the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina opened in 1963. A building that once embodied the era’s utopian socialist dreams has become a ruin. Situated one hundred meters from the frontline of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, exterior traces of shelling and grenade blasts are a surface level hint of deeper challenges within. Unpaid museum staff shiver through freezing winters without heating, while the state withholds resources that would stem the flow of water leaking through the roof.
In response, U-TT in collaboration with Baier Bischofberger Architects have developed a series of temporary design interventions with three key goals in mind. Firstly, to quickly and cheaply preserve the existing building before permanent funding can be secured. Secondly, to empower the bottom-up social processes already underway. And thirdly, to transform the institution into a catalytic urban cultural hub. At the project’s center is a proposal to sheath the museum in a transparent vinyl skin. Suspended on construction scaffolding and tethered with wires, the skin represents a first move to stabilize the degrading structure and a low‑cost base for future repairs.
Encasing the existing building seals it against the weather and allows for simple heating. But the secondary structure also acts as flexible infrastructure. The skin will not only create new covered spaces between and around the current footprint, but also a framework for additional walkways and platforms. Zippers in the vinyl permit the insertion of new access points and openings, as well as the option to expand or contract the covering in response to seasonal climatic changes. The resulting scheme achieves a balance between continuity and improvement. The interventions support the museum’s move to open itself to the city, while also activating the site through new programming possibilities.
Reinforcing the idea that the ‘People’s Museum’ belongs to everyone, we envision it as a living space that manifests no difference between its collection and public function. In the future, visitors will gather to watch a twilight facade projection, before climbing to a rooftop platform to find a better vantage point for a concert happening in the open-air courtyard stage below. Inside the museum, students will take advantage of the free wifi in the expanded Café Tito space, while a team of local volunteers develop micro preservation programs in the adjacent (work)shop. The city will enter the museum, and the museum will become part of the urban landscape.

The People’s Museum

Challenging the existing vision for the Avenida, U-TT pushed to include a more complex program, through the suggestion of additional programs for each site. One feature of the larger Avenida Lecuna project, the Teatros building, provides important social services for the neighborhood in an innovative aggregation of functions.
Varied programming is mixed together and includes a kindergarten, public health clinics, sport facilities, retail, art spaces, and governmental agencies. The activities are overlapped, layered and linked within the buildings and throughout the Avenida.
For the largest site, we connected a housing block directly to Teatros metro station by bridging over the avenue, directly linking housing and infrastructure.  The additional space we gained with the bridge allowed us to accommodate a bakery, print company, radio station, auditorium, library, exhibition spaces, bar, sports field, swimming pool and rooftop chapel in the project.
For the framework of the tower, we reinvented the modernist housing type by linking residential units to flexible production spaces, which become realized as a stack of public spaces spiraling up through the building.  This is an adoption of a barrio typology in which streets are an extension of the home, in which housing units and public productive areas interlace into one body.

Teatros: Growing House

The sidewalks of cities have become contested zones, where pedestrians usually lose out to cars and other vehicular traffic. The “parklet” model initiated by Rebar represents a simple, “user-generated” strategy to expand the public realm where existing sidewalk width is insufficient to support a vibrant street life. U-TT’s Public Spectacle parklet, commissioned in 2014 by Swissnex San Fransisco, and developed in partnership with Jan Gehl Architects, builds on the idea of encouraging new forms of civic agency by providing an adaptable space for public exchange.
The design uses the full volumetric potential of a single parking space and is able to take on multiple configurations, through a set of moving elements attached to a steel frame. These transformations allow for different uses, such as performances, lectures, screenings, public seating, meetings, and inventive appropriation by users. The parklet is located at the new Swissnex headquarters on Montgomery Street, where it serves as a dynamic bridge linking the programs and activities housed within the building to public life outside.

Location	San Francisco, USA
Client	Swissnex San Fransisco
Leads	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Concept and Design	Katerina Kourkoula, Hannes Gutberlet, Danny Wills, Max Harden
Collaborators	Swissnex San Fransisco, Gehl Architects, Professor Krisina Hill at UC Berkeley College of Envrionmental Design
Construction	Paul Trautman, Billy from Treasure Island
Status	Completed

Swissnex Parklet