As the Munch Museum in Olso nears completion, Madrid-based Estudio Herreros – in collaboration with the Norwegian firm MIM-A – has finished a residential block in Sant Boi de Llobregat (Barcelona). Offering a mixture of free-market and price-regulated living units, it is a volume that has been designed with a good measure of rigor and restraint. On the one hand, the programmatic and functional rigor that maximizes useful floor area by grouping the circulation elements in a centralized core and concentrating access in a single, floor-through entrance. And on the other hand, the formal restraint of a sober construction that is nuanced by generous terraces, and characterized by the repetition of standardized windows and the use of three principal building features: a ventilated facade of sandwich panels, the lattices that coat the walls of the interior corridors, and the ceramic tiles that form the cladding of the walls and the floors in the building’s accessways.