85 Social Housing Units in Cornellà by : Peris + Toral Arquitectes - Marta Peris - José Toral

Award of the Year Ex aequo Architecture

Project 85 Social Housing Units in Cornellà

Spain

By

Peris + Toral Arquitectes - Marta Peris - José Toral

Spain peristoral.com

Social Housing Extraordinaire!

EX ÆQUO Prix de l'année

The basis of this new social housing residential building, set in Cornellà de Llobregat in Barcelona, Spain, are a matrix of communicating rooms that eliminates corridors and guarantee optimum use of the floor plan.

85/5/4 Designed by the creative tandem Marta Peris and Jose Toral of PERIS+TORAL ARQUITECTES, the project consists of 85 social housing units laid out on five levels and divided in four group corners.

BASQUE COUNTRY TIMBER To enable the industrialization of elements, improved quality of construction and a major reduction of deadlines and C02 emissions, a total of 8,300 m2 of zero kilometer timber from the Basque Country was used and brought to the 10,000 m2 surface area.

A FOUR-WAY COURTYARD The building is organized around a courtyard that articulates a sequence of intermediate spaces. On the ground floor, a porch opens up upon the city. Creating a doorway to the building and filtering the relationship between public space and the courtyard, it acts as a small plaza for the community.

Instead of entering directly and independently from the outer façade to each lobby of the building, four vertical communication shafts located at all four corners of the courtyard invite occupants to converge and meet in the plaza, this safe space from a gender perspective.

A RING OF OUTDOOR SPACES Access to each and every unit goes through one of the four stairways while private terraces that make up the ring of outdoor spaces overlook the most welcoming courtyard.

The 85 housing units are divided into four groups and laid out on five floors, with a total of 18 units per floor.

A MATRIX OF COMMUNICATING SPACES The building’s general floor plan is a matrix of communicating rooms. There are no less than 114 spaces per floor, for a total of 543 interconnected spaces in the building, all of similar dimensions, eliminating both private and community corridors to make the maximum use of the floor space.

Common and service areas are laid out in the central ring, while the rest of the rooms, of undifferentiated use and size, are set up along the complex’s façade and accommodate different forms of occupation. The rooms’ surface area of 13 sq. meters and generous proportions allow widespaced corners to facilitate the occupants’ appropriation of space.

AN OUTER-RING TERRACE Another terrace in the outer ring completes the spatial sequence. A symmetric row of spaces are thus interconnected by large openings and permeable to fresh air, outside gaze and city movement. HOME SWEET HOME Of the 85 units, some are laid out around the communication shafts, ensuring that each space is cross-ventilated and faces two directions. Each apartment consists of five or six modules, depending on whether they host two or three bedrooms.

The apartments’ inclusive open-plan kitchen is located in the central room, acting as a space to come together while replacing corridors and making domestic work visible and counter-perceiving traditional gender roles.

WOOD WORK The rooms’ size offers flexibility based on ambiguity of use and functional indeterminacy and ensures an optimal setting for the wooden architectural elements of the structure. In order to achieve the economic viability required in such a social housing project, the volume of wood required per square meter of construction was optimized, representing 0.24 m3 per square meter of built surface area. Bravo!

JURY’S KUDO

« Crisp, clean, innovative and refreshingly well organized! A special nod to the project’s adaptability to social housing and wonderful use of mass timber elements that speak to acknowledge sustainability issues.»