Hollow Mass

Hollow Mass reimagines a single dwelling as a solid block that has been carved out from within, a collective housing study designed by Santiago Ardila and Magali Schenkow in Roraima, Brazil. The project was developed during the 2019 edition of the Master in Collective Housing, a workshop led by Andrea Deplazes of berth+deplazes and Fernando Altozano. The brief asked each team to design a housing building defined by its depth, and in this case the group worked within a constraint of 10.5 meters from facade to facade.

Depth is one of the harder problems in collective housing design. The deeper a floor plate becomes, the further interior rooms sit from natural light and cross ventilation, and the easier it is for the center of a dwelling to turn dark and stale. Most housing typologies answer this with courtyards, light wells, or shallow plans. Hollow Mass takes a different route. Rather than thinning the building, the architects treat the whole mass as material to be removed, excavating or digging into a massive block until it becomes hollow.

Thick Walls and a Carved Interior

The result reads almost like a castle, where every wall is thick and the structure itself holds the rooms. The central living room takes the leading role, a generous void at the heart of the plan, with the private spaces arranged around it. Because the mass is carved rather than assembled, the spaces left behind are never wasted. All the residual pockets between rooms become useful parts of the dwelling, absorbed into storage, circulation, or quiet corners of the home.

The project is above all an experiment with light inside the space. Thick walls deepen the openings, so daylight enters slowly and falls across the surfaces with a heavy, shifting quality. This relationship between solid mass and carved void echoes a long tradition in architecture, from rock-cut dwellings to monastic plans, where shelter is found by subtracting from matter rather than building up walls. Roraima, the northernmost state of Brazil, offers a fitting backdrop for that idea, its strong equatorial light giving the thick openings something powerful to frame.

Hollow Mass stands as a compact argument that density and generosity can share the same wall, and that what you remove from a building can shape it as much as what you add.