Torre Domestikah
Hidden Wallssupervised by Frida Escobedo
collaboration with Samantha Ingallina
Location: Torre Mitikah, Mexico
Date: 2020
Domestic labor is well-ingrained in the lifestyle, but has remained largely invisible and undervalued. Despite domestic workers’ crucial role in the care-taking and maintenance of nearly every household in Mexico City, the built environment has kept them hidden and separated from the other tenants, often tucked away in the windowless laundry and storage rooms. With the Mexican’s government’s recent recognition of C189 - Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189), however, domestic labor will finally become a formalized profession with basic labor rights. Our proposal acknowledges that developers and architects must also address this in built environment.
Mexico City is often characterized by its horizontal urban sprawl, the intensity of which is heightened by an overburdened transportation infrastructure. In more recent years, however, a solution to the sprawl has emerged in the form of vertical development: skyscrapers. Residential towers, in particular, are magnets that attract swaths of upper- and middle-class tenants. With these tenants, also come their domestic labor staff; they account for a large portion of the population but aren’t thought about when developing the coming urban fabric. Selecting 13 recently built towers and dissecting their plans, revealed that roughly 5-10% of a tower’s gross square footage is dedicated to hidden domestic worker living spaces. The status quo for developers in Mexico City is to treat these domestic spaces as part of the tower’s MEP core: hidden from view, but vital to its operation.
The research intentionally analyzes the conditions and desires from the perspective and the domestic worker, the developer, and the city simulatenously. This three pronged approach can utilize the advantages to all three parties in order to push the project. Our proposal establishes a key difference between human and infrastructural cores and the need to treat them differently spatially. Taking Torre Mitikah as a prime example, we find that it has 6,200 sm of domestic space throughout the building -- which is easily enough space for 50 spacious, 3-bedroom apartments. By simply re-organizing non-structural elements throughout the tower we are able to create affordable housing for domestic workers. Instead of living in the closet spaces of their employers’ homes, domestic workers can now live with their families in the privacy of their own homes. In this way, our project proposes a typological strategy for retrofitting Mexico City’s residential towers in a way that is beneficial for domestic workers, tenants, and developers alike.
