M or M Studio:
Katherine Martinez
Dontai Rodriguez
Laura Maldonado

San Juan, PUERTO RICO

The Lighthouse Complex

The Lighthouse Complex is a mix use multifamily dwelling design made with containers as the principal material with a sustainable saving energy approach.  The multiuse complex is divided in commercial, residential and public zones. This design recognizes the train station with its tower as a historical landmark, and due to the direct accessibility to the site, it pretends to knit the city by creating new pathways that will develop into a new sense of property and community to the city. The Site works with its, surrounding context and an urban wall which denies the spread of land dedicated to parking lots, giving form to a new small scale metropolis typology for Newark. 
For the living area containers of forty feet long in vertical and horizontal position, where the vertical ones work as stairs for circulation and at the end it creates a delicate lighthouse effect during night. The horizontal ones solve the dwelling program from studios to 3 room apartments. The residential zone connects to the rest of the city through a plaza created next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where it connects directly with the train station, dividing and unifying the site.
The commercial area faces the Railroad Station, the University Avenue, and the Orange Street. On its east and south facades the program is divided with the first two floors commercial spaces and the last two as residential. It counts with parking, bicycle path and public open spaces for the community development.