Metous Studio, a young mock firm of 10 undergraduate architecture students from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo working under the guidance of the head partners David Lee and Anthony Stahl, have designed a fresh and dynamic housing tower for Mexio City. Placing above 30 international entries, Lee and Stahl’s tower has been awarded first prize in the 2010 Mock Firms International Skyscraper Challenge: Collegiate Division. Their approach reconfigures the traditional Mexican street as an open-air high-rise to provide unlimited potential for a new type of urban environment. ”The meaning of the tower is a living being that breathes in the city and is truly defined by Mexican culture and people,” explained Lee and Stahl.
Check out some great images, diagrams and much more about the award winning project after the break.
By shifting key components of Mexico’s urban fabric to the vertical dimension, a new three-dimensional urban organizational grid is formed. The street is continued from the ground plane and becomes the connecting thread linking the entire tower. The street reacts to sunlight, wind, adjacencies and population density, as it sometimes widens for commercial activity, an open green space, or to provide visual and circulatory freedom.
