Urban-Think Tank's Vertical Gym is a prefabricated kit of parts, adaptable to any location. The base of the structure is superimposed upon an existing community basketball court, soccer field, or vacant lot, transforming it into a multi-level sports complex that can accommodate hundreds of people at a time. In this way, the design maximizes the potential of any city space, particularly areas with a dense urban fabric.

U-TT believes that engaging in exercise and social activity is a right of all citizens in the city, no matter their social and economic backgrounds. Given the dire need for such facilities in low-income neighborhoods and informal settlements around the world, U-TT wishes to partner with municipal governments, private businesses, industry, and community organizations that are interested in bringing a vertical gym to their respective cities.

Sports for Social Change

Vertical Gym

Sports building

The cable car design with social infrastructure is integrated with the Metro System of Caracas. The system is 2.1 km in length and employs gondolas holding 8 passengers each. Metro Cable's capacity allows for the movement of 1.200 people per hour in each direction. Two stations are in the valley and connect directly to the Caracas public transportation system. Three additional stations are located along the mountain ridge, on sites that meet the demands of community access, established pedestrian circulation patterns, and spatial availability for construction, ensuring minimal demolition of existing housing.

The five stations' designs share a basic set of components: platform levels, ramps for access, circulation patterns, materials, and structural elements. However, each station differs in configuration and additional functions, and the separate stations include cultural, social, and system administrative functions; replacement of demolished residences with more homes, as well as public spaces; a gym, supermarket, and daycare center; and a link between the cable car system and the municipal bus circuit.

Metro Cable

Infrastructure & Mobility

The “Voz Alta” Autistic Foundation’s new headquarters and educational building will is located in the Caracas municipality of Baruta. The school is oriented to the specialized teaching of children with autism for both pre-school and elementary grades.

In total, the building includes 10 classrooms for approximately 80 students. The classrooms are organized around a central patio with a north-south orientation to guarantee good illumination and ventilation. The design feature includes a ramp as the main vertical circulation that wraps around the external perimeter of the building. This alternative ramp circulation unites the public and private functions and creates a space where children can have their daily physical activity in a protected environment. Both the ramp and the more private vertical staircase will be covered by a modular steel cage façade that will allow for ventilation and illumination throughout the building, but more importantly, it will add safety for the children in the public corridors.

School for Autistic Children

FAVA

School

The Europe pavilion for the BCN RE.SET Tricentenari commemoration by Urban-Think Tank in collaboration with ESARQ is based on the concept of the game XARRANCA. Originally a children's game where, through a hopping journey through multiple spaces, the goal is to reach "cielo", the sky.

The XARRANCA pavilion is a three-dimensional representation of the journey through the multiple houses of Europe, the collective exchange of individual experiences, and the journey to reach the destiny of cielo - an integrated dream Europe - as reflected in the terminus point of the sea. The pavilion is an expression of both the erasure of boundaries and a celebration of differences. Its placement on the plaza allows for free movement through the canopies, while its colored houses are a sculptural statement on the diversity of Europe but also the historic barrio on the beach that was torn down for the Barcelona Olympics.

Through a collaboration with the local community of craftsmen, fishermen, and historians, the pavilion is built out of local and recycled wood, and compressed earth, clay, and sand. The creation of the pavilion from the design to the building is a participatory action, combining the collective knowledge of the neighborhood and city.

Xarranca Pavilion Design

Urban Design

Developed by Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in collaboration with an international network of partners such as Universidad del Norte (Uni-Norte), the Fábrica de Cultura: BAQ will provide an Art & Craft School for teaching young people the creative arts and popular traditions for Barranquilla-s Carnival. Operated by the municipality, the facility will offer cultural education, in music, dance, sculpture, dress making, painting poetry, theatre, food production, digital film and audio techniques, to all residents but especially to the popular Barrio Abajo.

The low-cost design, which utilizes local materials and processes of prefabrication, adopts open building principles to establish a creative framework that can be modified and reprogrammed by users over time. Working closely with engineers from the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, as well as experts in sustainable building technology from the Chair of Architecture and Building systems (formerly Architecture & Sustainable Building Technologies - SuAT Chair) at ETH Zürich, the aim was to develop a flexible building prototype and construction system that can be replicated throughout the region.

The Fabrica de Cultura: BAQ project is sponsored by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), and coordinated by the Inter-American Development Bank as part of the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative. In September 2016, the project was recognized with an international Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture.

Escuela Distrital de Arte (EDA)

The Social Housing Empower Shack project found a home in Khayelitsha through the partnerships of U-TT and the local NGO Ikhayalami. The concept is to develop a new open-source housing prototype and urban plan, which could be a model for informal settlement upgrading across South Africa. Using the existing footprint of the shack and working closely and transparently with residents and city planners, structures are built creating homes, not just houses. We have successfully built 51 homes to date and are hoping to build many more.

We continue to search for support to keep building houses, and hope you can see the innovation and help make Khayelitsha a more vibrant community and culture hub with programmes to develop children and the youth through culture as well as support local artists, arts organizations, and initiatives. The architecture demonstrates that it is possible to make a space where local and international collaborations can add to the liveliness of the settlement and bring economic development and jobs into the area.

The Empower Shack is an approach that holds the potential to have a great and positive impact on the future of cities globally by transforming informal settlements. To get involved contact us at info@uttdesign.com, we need your support to succeed with this transformation.

Empower Shack

Social Impact

This transformation of the Foreshore area aims to reconnect the city to the sea, embrace an equitable approach to the way the city is built, achieve more effective flows of people and goods, and enable it to adapt better to the future.

We considered demolishing the freeways and divert traffic into a subsurface tunnel. This would free up the land in and around the freeways for development but would come at a major up-front (unfeasible) cost that might be unrecoverable in the long term.

Our proposition is to drop the freeways to the ground, and lift the city up over them, creating an elevated berm - this will extend the grid of the city, lifting it over the public transport and move cars below, at a height of about 7 to 10 meters above existing ground level. The elevated berm will create a new city district, terminating the city at its north-eastern end, with development around a major park system, and a ‘grand urban balcony’ providing the public with views of the ocean and harbor, as well as Table Mountain.

CityLift

U-TT has been building social impact projects in Khayelitsha, which is a partially informal township in Western Cape, South Africa, on the Cape Flats in the City of Cape Town and reputed to be the largest growing township in South Africa. Unofficial estimates of people living in Khayelitsha vary between 750.000 to 2 million, Khayelitsha comprises 38.71 km2 and runs for a number of kilometers along the N1. The proposed site for M'Click Cultural Complex (4 theatres and music school) is optimally located in the center of Khayelitsha Harare Police Station facing the building site. The City of Cape Town's long-term plan is to make this area a major cultural and social hub for the greater community.

The commissioning client MIAGI - Music is a great Investment - a not-for-profit organization based in South Africa that offers a wide range of educational opportunities equipping young South Africans to advance their life prospects. The pat proposed by MIAGI is to offer a platform for intercultural creative dialog, which brings young people, artists and audiences together that would otherwise never meet.

MIAGI

Performing Arts

Funding: Fundraising opens Q4 2021 - for more information contact info@uttdesign.com

Little Angels is a community center for children and youth in the township of Handberg in Cape Town, South Africa. The center was set up by Liezl Mathews in 2011, originally as a crèche as she saw a great need to keep children off the streets, away from drugs and troubled family relations. The crèche was meant as an option for families who could not pay for regular crèche.

In 2014, Leizl together with Jacobus and Maria Montgomery launched the youth and after-care programs. The programs could only partially operate due to a lack of space (especially in winter when the outside area could not be used and there was no electricity for the evenings), but the programs have consistently grown, developed, and become part of what makes Little Angels so special. Because seeing children coming together for a better tomorrow is special. Seeing a group of youth determined to change their lives and community is special. 

Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) initiated The Little Angels Youth and Women center project in 2017 and brought in the Norwegian firm Helen&Hard Arkitekter (HHA) in 2020 to collaborate. The team is collaborating on the design, fundraising, and construction of the center.

School for Little Angels

Transforming the former docklands of Bergen offers the opportunity to add a neighbourhood with a different identity to Bergen, adding on to the waterfront route that is envisioned along the Puddefjorden.

Social and economic benefits for all arise when developing the docklands into an inclusive waterfront. Key for this proposal is that there will be sports and play and seating in the public realm. The waterfront edge will have easy access. Upgraded public transport should guarantee that people  from neighbourhoods further away regard the area as within their reach.

The Laksevåg Waterfront will strongly contribute to the quality of life. As urban life and sports bring people together those facilities will be enriched with temporary activities and events. There will be places for storing materials to set up skate events or local beach volleyball tournaments, integrating the waterfront and daily life.

The public space will embrace the former history while looking towards the future, being innovative and provocative to new uses. Cities connected to the water call for the imagination. The waterfront will be linking city to ocean, and recalls to Norway as the seafaring nation.

A holistic approach is required: providing access for all and making sure that via innovative solution a unique experience will be created, taking on board the state of the art on flood protection, climate adaptivity and circular solutions.