The barrio in Chihuahua's rugged topography isn't just housing; it's a morphological catalyst, a vernacular intelligence of incremental growth built to survive an extreme desert climate. Terrascape reads that logic as a rule set and lets Monoceros grow from it, rather than imposing an order from outside.
Context
IAAC · Barcelona
Year
2025
Stack
Monoceros / WFC · Grasshopper · Environmental analysis · 3D-printed adobe
Brief
Terrascape does not impose an external order; it encodes the survival logic of the Mexican informal barrio to transform it into a dignified, resilient, and dynamic housing system.
01 · Strategy
Three computational concepts translate the barrio's spontaneous survival logic: Wave Function Collapse for rule-based rather than gridded growth, a topographical agent that interweaves with Chihuahua's hills, and modular dignification (structural safety and climate resilience without losing the self-built essence).
02 · Typology
Organised like the traditional open-air market, clusters stay under six modules to hold a human scale. Housing modules go subterranean for thermal inertia or open to voids above for ventilation; functional modules carry commerce and rainwater harvesting; circulation modules (cores and bridges) adapt to the slope.
03 · Workflow
The terrain is read first, a Traveling Salesman solve finds the shortest path between points of interest, and that route projects onto the module grid for Monoceros to aggregate against. The result reports its own area, BCR, FAR and population density as it forms.
04 · Validation
From a steep mountain periphery demanding an organic response to a flat urban lot suited to grid logic, the aggregation was tested across five extreme topographical conditions, proving the system holds regardless of slope or scale.
