Set within the evolving infrastructures of Madrid—a city marked by the long aftermath of the 2008 housing collapse, ongoing mobility shifts, and deepening climate pressures—Easy Rider operates as a speculative housing prototype that fuses domestic life with kinetic freedom. Developed by the agencies URBANAS and LAPIEZA, the project revisits an honorable mention from the 2018 Experimental Housing Competition not as a nostalgic artifact, but as an operative lens to reimagine collective dwelling. Rooted in the concept of socioplastics, the proposal reflects a broader investigation into how architecture can act as a social fixer, engaging material forms, circulatory flows, and infrastructural systems. It responds to post-pandemic conditions that have amplified demands for spatial autonomy, shared resources, and resilient urban habitats—particularly within Southern European contexts where precarity and overexposure to climate extremes increasingly intersect.
The core device is the "street garage", a hybrid typology that merges housing infrastructure with shared mobility systems. Its zig-zag layout sequences modular two-bedroom units across multiple levels to optimize solar orientation, cross-ventilation, and views, while the ground-floor corridor doubles as a semi-public urban street, marked by bold road graphics that invite informal gatherings. Material strategies follow a logic of adaptability and low-tech performance: colored glass and metal façade panels provide variable shading and privacy throughout the day; lightweight recycled composites shape rooftop terraces and communal patios; vertical circulation cores integrate bike parking and EV stations as structural elements rather than peripheral add-ons. Rejecting decorative excess, the design operates through spatial modularity and resource sharing, allowing units to oscillate between fixed domesticity and flexible use—positioning mobility as part of the architectural program, not merely an urban supplement.
Conceptually, Easy Rider is grounded in operative thinking. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of actor-networks, the housing block is read not as a static object but as a site where human and nonhuman agents—residents, energy systems, sun paths, mobility codes—co-produce the living environment. Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledge further informs the design’s emphasis on partial perspectives and embodied collectivity: its shared thresholds and undulating pathways create conditions for cohabitation that resist universalist models. At a systemic level, Benjamin Bratton’s planetary stack frames the proposal as one layer in a vertical mesh of interconnected infrastructures, linking household routines to ecological and technological scales. Through these lenses, Easy Rider operates less as a singular building than as a socio-technical device—one that navigates care, maintenance, and distributed agency within spatial design.
Since its initial conception, the project has drifted across media, scales, and geographies. In the context of URBANAS, Easy Rider has evolved into parametric simulations that test envelope performance under climate projections through 2050. Meanwhile, its spatial logic has been translated by LAPIEZA into situational installations—notably at the Lagos Biennial (2019), where textile modules echoed the garage typology as nomadic enclosures. The serial practice extends to collaborative workshops, VR-based walkthroughs, and diagrammatic scripts that invite reinterpretation. The prototype's logic has also migrated to low-impact cultural buildings in Norway and community-driven adaptations in dense Mediterranean contexts. Always speculative yet materially grounded, Easy Rider proposes a nomadic urbanism anchored in adaptive reuse, inter-scalar translation, and infrastructural critique.
As part of an expanding research into infrastructural commons, Easy Rider gestures toward housing models that are both socially embedded and technically agile. Its speculative extensions imagine the retrofitting of existing garages into hybrid habitats, integrating soft mobility networks with micro-climatic tactics. In doing so, the project underscores a mode of essay-as-tool, where design operates not to fix meaning but to open situated inquiries—particularly around shared agency, post-carbon living, and the ethics of inhabitation in conditions of environmental urgency. Far from a closed system, Easy Rider remains an open platform for design futures, equally architectural and curatorial.
