These parasitic buildings commandeer wasted urban space, often siphoning utilities from their host buildings. Some are additions that make no attempt to blend into the original structures, some are serious solutions for making the most of existing space, and others make artistic statements on fringe society and sustainable growth, but all illustrate that there are still many corners and crevices of our cities that could be put to use.
1. ParaSITE Inflatable Shelters
Michael Rakowitz creates inflatable ‘paraSITE shelters’ for the homeless, often specifically designed to suit individual needs, which narrowly fit within the definitions of legal temporary structures since they’re not much larger than a sleeping bag. They’re often made on a budget of less than five dollars using trash bags, ziploc bags and clear waterproof packing tape, and attached to the ventilation systems of adjacent buildings. One man, for example, requested as many windows as possible, because “homeless people don’t have privacy issues, but they do have security issues. We want to see potential attackers, we want to be visible to the public.”
2. Urban Tree Huts by Tadashi Kawamata
Tadashi Kawamata’s rustic pine tree houses are normally found where you would expect them - in trees (though sometimes in unexpected places, like New York City’s Madison Square Park.) But sometimes, they’re attached like man-made bird nest to urban locations, like lamp posts, bridge trusses, scaffolding and luxury apartment buildings.
3. Stone Villa on Top of a Chinese Condo Tower
An eccentric Chinese man spent six years creating his very own mountain paradise - on top of a Beijing high-rise - illegally. It has everything you’d expect from a luxury residence including boulders, trees, gardens, winding paths, viewing platforms and pools, hauled up through the building to adorn his private penthouse retreat. Unsurprisingly, other residents in the 26-story building have complained about construction noise and even flooding. The Chinese government has ordered the professor to remove the 800-square-meter villa.
4. Prefab Parasite
Empty vertical surfaces could become the basis of parasitic living spaces made out of prefab panels. The dwellings could be affixed to any wall or pylon strong enough to support them using a mountain plate. This particular design, by Lara Calder Architects, features panelling made of compressed bamboo and recycled paper. It measures about 400 square feet, and features an open-air rooftop terrace. A combination staircase and service shaft connecting the home to power, sewer and water is the only part touching the ground.
5. Excrescent Utopia: Parasite Architecture for the Homeless
British architecture graduate Milo Ayden De Luca envisions parasitic structures for the homeless that could cling to the sides of lamp posts. Made of cheap and readily available materials like pulleys, nylon and rope lines, the structures are translucent and nearly weightless.
6. The Illegal Architecture of Taiwan
Look just beyond the ‘official’ architecture of Taipei, on the borders of the city and on top of skyscrapers, and you’ll find a secret network of illegal architecture that attaches itself ‘like a parasite’ to create unsanctioned urban farms, night markets and other social gathering places. Instant City is a project spearheaded by a loose collective of architects who seek to infuse the rigid, permanent parts of the city with living, growing structures.
7. Hanging Parasite Office in Moscow
Challenged to repurpose unused spaces in urban areas for Moscow’s ARCH Biennale, Za Bor Architects created ‘Parasite Office’, which is wedged between two existing high rises. It creates space for a design office without disrupting traffic on the street below, and its translucent, cloud-like appearance avoids creating an oppressively heavy feel in a previously open space.
8. Music School Louviers Extension by Opus 5
A concert hall perches atop a seventeenth century convent in northern France in this project by Opus 5 architects. The glass-fronted extension wraps over the southern wing of the complex to create an orchestral hall with a ribbon-like mirrored ceiling.
9. Steel Box on Top of a Brick Bar and Restaurant
London architects Project orange added two stories to a brick warehouse in Sheffield, England by essentially just placing an additional structure right on top. The addition overlaps and cuts through the original structure, creating three duplex studio offices.
10. Parasitic Emergency Homes
Survivors of floods could hang out in prefabricated modular dwellings that cling onto abandoned buildings like parasites, in this concept by designer Mike Reyes. Created for Sao Paulo, Brazil, the structures are brought in by helicopters and hook onto the windows of abandoned structures (of which there are plenty in that particular city). They would provide safe emergency shelter with beds, lighting, storage and a skylight, to help people get by until their communities are rebuilt.
11. Parasite Las Palmas
Parasite Las Palmas is a bright green structure placed on top of an abandoned warehouse on the Rotterdam waterfront by Korteknie Stulmacher Architecten. A prototype of a prefabricated home, the building hangs on the top of the warehouse's elevator shaft, specifically designed to wrap around it. It siphons all of its utilities from the main building, and depends on the warehouse for structural support.
12. Rehearsal Room Between Two Parisian Homes
Another lightweight-looking parasitic structure between two buildings provides a cellist with a rehearsal space in Paris. Cut Architectures suspended a glass cube between the owner’s home and an adjacent building, leaving a space underneath to create a new carport/garage in the driveway below.
13. AME-LOT Proposal by Stephane Malka
Student housing gets an extension in the form of a parasitic ‘skin’ made almost entirely of salvaged wooden pallets in this concept by Stephane Malka. “The real environmental approach consists not in destruction, but in superimposing interventions upon our built heritage. It consists of a new land strategy, unreferenced on a parcel, constructed in a de facto ‘ecology’ of means.”
14. Manifest Destiny: Claiming Space in San Francisco
A tiny, rustic cabin clings to the wall of an urban high-rise in San Francisco as a statement on “the romantic spirit of Western myth” and the arrogance of westward expansion in the 19th century, bringing incongruous structures to land that already belongs to other people. “Manifest Destiny! is about intrepidly claiming and occupying space regardless of hazard, existing occupants, inconvenience, daunting odds, or common sense,” says artist Mark Reigelman.
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