This housing project is a foundational counter-proposal to the functional distribution and land use conditions of the contemporary city and yet it is inspired by the Unité D’habitation de Marseille, a modernist housing project designed by Le Corbusier, as well as by the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt and her abhorrence of a lonely, competitive, and rootless human condition characterized by what she called “a society of jobholders” – one which is focused on useless material gains at the expense of greater states of human consciousness and higher intellectual achievements.

 

It is located in the City of Miami and occupies one quarter of a mile square along the Allapattah Metrorail Station. Its simple shape is a reminder of the neighborhood unit implied in Thomas Jefferson’s Land Survey of 1785 and its relentless expression on the American territory. The project is composed of a peripheral apartment building with civic institutions and public spaces allocated in terraces and roof gardens; a vertical farming skyscraper at its center is flanked by a small plaza and surrounded by long plots of agriculture.

 

The quarter mile square project contains everything needed for human daily living at walking distance, including food production.