Luis Fernández-Galiano   God is in details, and so are we. Life's pleasures sometimes lie in tiny circumstances, and the beauty of a house often rests in essential minutiae. Inevitably ruled by the foreseeable rhythms of collective routine, our individual existence reclaims

Carlo Baumschlager, Dietmar Eberle   Architecture in general, and that of residential buildings in particular, is built on systems that have evolved at a regional level. What types of construction are possible, what styles are in demand, what materials are in use, what level of craftsma

Ignacio Paricio   Josep Blanchart, president of the Barcelona Fair’s Salón Construmat, invited me to lunch at his favorite restaurant. While we were having appetizers he once again drew my attention to the problems of contemporary housing from the viewpoint of the Sal

De Architectengroep   Netherlands   True to the Dutch tradition of expanding cities by claiming land from the sea, Amsterdam authorities thought early on filling and draining their old port for an eventual urbanization of the zone, close to downtown. In awareness of the area’s historic

Archteam   Czech Republic   For much of the 20th century, architects have put a lot of effort into formulating accessible housing typologies. Residential building, however, is so inexorably tied to local traditions and economic circumstances that the term ‘cheap’, applied to ho

Felipe Artengo, Fernando Menis, José María Rodríguez Pastrana   Spain   The San Antonio area of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is part of a residential periphery that has emerged along the highway linking La Laguna with the capital. With the petrous vocation of a volcanic formation, a building of sixty social housing units rises

Carlos Asensio, Francisco Burgos, José María de Lapuerta   Spain   The speculative pressure on Madrid now hovers as well over peripheral localities like Coslada, which have begun to exchange the small rural house for apartment blocks. The residents association building, up to now accommodated in a single floor level

Baumschlager Eberle Architekten   Austria    From the closed perimetral block to the highrise, an entire catalog of urban forms graces the site outside Innsbruck that was staked out to accommodate a large number of subsidized apartments. Bordered to the south by the 1960s buildings of the univ

burkhalter sumi architekten   Switzerland   To the north of Zürich, where vegetation begins to be the city’s prominent feature, fourteen residential blocks built in the sixties repeat one same scheme, differentiated one from the other by slight setbacks and small variations in height. Their fl

Carmassi Studio di Architettura   Italy   The location of this residential block in the outskirts of Pontedera – on the banks of the Arno, halfway between Florence and Pisa – warranted the categorical form with which it defines its urban environs. Separated from the town center by a tributar

Claus en Kaan   Netherlands   The rietlanden parcel is perhaps the most urban of those comprising the operation of giving the Java, KNSM, Borneo and Sporenburg docks a residential function, in the wake of the transfer of port activities to the west zone of Amsterdam’s harbor in t

Fité & Mejón   Spain   Situated in the vicinity of the Nova cathedral, the stairway of Sanct Llorenç is a narrow passage that follows the tight and crowded character of the Moorish scheme of Lérida’s urban center. As part of a municipal effort to revitalize the city’s hist

Rainer M. Kresing   Germany   A central location, soaring ceilings and large floor plan dimensions are the features that have made some old industrial buildings the target of real estate investors eager to diversify their offer in a market increasingly in need of spatial flexibil

Daniele Marques   Switzerland   A placid zone of villas with extensive gardens outside Lucerne is undergoing a densification process through the addition of housing units on the parcels. So as not to upset the current physiognomy of the development – based on independent volumes in

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Netherlands   Following the specifications for a new lowrise, high-density residential quarter, the masterplan for Borneo Eiland in Amsterdam imposed three stories, bays reaching far back, and division of land into plots in such a way that every unit would be in c

Alexander Reichel   Germany   Stationed among the hills that characterize the landscape of central Germany, the city of Kassel consigned institutions like the slaughterhouse, the orphanage and the prison out to the Unterneustadt quarter, inscribed within a dense residential fabri

João Álvaro Rocha   Portugal   In a low-density area close to the center of the Portuguese town of Maia, a triangular parcel was made the starting point of a social housing development, the clear-cut shape of which was intended to establish the bases for restructuring the urban co

Sergison Bates architects   United Kingdom   The euphemism ‘semi-detached’describes in Great Britain the suburban ideal of living in the city while enjoying the advantages of the countryside, that has made it one of Europe’s most urbanized countries. Using this model of the English periphery th

Tuomo Siitonen   Finland   Literally interwoven with nature, Espoo exemplifies the low density of building that characterizes Finnish cities. With the aim of defining urban space while preserving the usual proportion of green zones, the construction on the street Säterinkatu i

Walter Unterrainer   Austria   With its many days of sunshine but chill, the Austrian region of Vorarlberg has all the conditions to justify the domestic uses of solar energy that are now being discovered. Close to Lake Constance and with the Alps as backdrop, the idyllic town of

Frits van Dongen   Netherlands   Through large-scale apartment buildings, the massive operation of converting the obsolete docks of the port of Amsterdam into a residential fabric has introduced an unexampled degree of compactness and density into the lowrise horizon of the Dutch ca

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos   Spain   The impartial grid of the Ensanche (19thcentury urban enlargement) – able as it is to assume all uses – has transformed this part of Barcelona into a checkerboard of service-sector constructions removed from its original residential character. Contra

Cino Zucchi   Italy   Beyond the Grand Canal, toward the edges of the lake, is an everyday, domestic Venice removed from the mask of a city-museum that tourism, literature and movies have recreated with obstination. In the Giudecca quarter, the old grounds of the company