Pinup at Newcastle University
Pinup at Newcastle University

New York ParaSite Housing

This project was developed by Antonio González Viegas as a student from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla and was submited to the WAS awards 2017 under the Residential category.

New York faces now a “crisis of affordability”, which has put a huge strain on housing stock, and has led to New Yorkers having to spend increasing amounts to cover their housing expenses and have made entire neighborhoods unaffordable.

Is it possible to think of a solution from the architectural discipline, using limited resources, both in terms of plots of land and the availability of finance, to create homes and communities that can continue to be diverse and open to all?

New York ParaSite Housing drew inspiration from the very pests that plague the city, making use of New York’s so-called “5th wall” – its rooftops – allowing housing to be installed in almost any location across the city. The parasite housing structures would be connected to their host building in order to draw on its power and utilities and, like its namesake, living off its host, thus reducing the price of construction considerably.

The system consists of a catalogue of modulated catalogued rooms that the user would choose based on their needs and budget, thus making this project suitable for the numerous and diverse modern family types. Once the modules and the location chosen, the users would have their new homes delivered and installed. Whenever the families wanted to move to somewhere else, the “parasites” would go back to the warehouse, where they would be stored and re-used in further users, bringing the Life-Cycle-Analysis, recycling and environmental awareness to an urban scale.