Hotel House is a petit gratte-ciel cartésien designed in 1967 for tourism that was transformed by social and anthropological forces into a multiethnic rur-urban ghetto. Its very own Utopia was to merge, in a single landmark of a regional scale, a substantially collective/metropolitan building typology – the “tower” – and an individualistic and anti-urban habit – the “second house” at the beach. The social history of this territory and global geo-politics quickly coalesced to ruin such an ambitious program turning the monumental building – “in the middle of the fields” – into a typical case of troubled sub-urbanity, with expanding illegality, a lack of facilities and with collective spaces in ruin.

Our proposal is to trust architecture as an active agent in restoring the civic values of the city. The experiment, developed within the frame of the Metropolis cluster activities of SAAD, implies to achieve such spatial values without the support of the traditional toolkit of urban design. By parasitizing an existing hostile organism – “a city in itself”– we explore the potential of a collective design action – an axonometric collage of 9 projects of 9 different types of public spaces – considering the existing building as an inhabited palimpsest to be augmented into an inclusive urban organism. Civic space is here transplanted in the wounded body of the Hotel House in order to “heal” its spatial and social fabric.