Client:                                          Venezuelan Ministry of Housing

Location:                                    Maturin, Acarigua, San Carlos, Calabozo; Venezuela

Function:                                    Residential Development

Gross Floor Area:                      4 x 50-hectare townships

Realization:                                2005-2009

This huge project was defined as a result of mutual collaboration between Iran and Venezuela and is considered one the world’s largest construction projects carried out within the framework of a single contract. The aim was to improve habitat situation for the low-income people of Venezuela.

From the engineering point of view and apart from political issues, the realization of this project became possible through two major achievements:

1. An industrialized mass housing construction method invented by the project contractor under the title of ‘Large Scale Housing Construction Based on In-Situ Concrete Monolithic System’. In this system a fast-track reinforced concrete structure set-up would become possible through the usage of only a very limited modules of frameworks by means of repetition of which the building floors could rapidly go up.

2. An architectural and urban design compatible with this system which at the same time met the design criteria of residential buildings both in the scale of individual apartment building and mass-housing development.

The project had been defined to be accomplished in four different sites situated in four different cities in the country of Venezuela. In each site a complete township would take shape with all the functional needs of a residential neighborhood: schools, healthcare, civic and municipal structures as well as church, police station and public outdoor areas. Each township would cover an approximately 50 hectares of land in the outskirts of the cities of Maturin, Acarigua, San Carlos and Calabozo.

The generation of the urban layout of each township is in correlation with the arrangement of residential ‘clusters’: the grouping of six generic apartment blocks with pavements and a courtyard in the middle. These clusters themselves were the result of the optimum placement of apartment blocks considering the radius of operation of tower cranes that would set up the structure of each individual block.

At the same time a proper hierarchy of roads and accessibility of both public and residential areas has been in mind while taking into account an elegant urban form and function for each township.

My responsibilities:

• Providing information regarding design, specifications and materials
• Creating CAD drawings both in the scale of a single apartment block and urban design of the whole townships taking into consideration the design issues influenced by various other engineering disciplines that were involved in the project such as civil engineering, MEP engineering, site infrastructure, etc.