Tomás Montis Lluc Darder Aldeguer (DRDR Arquitectura)   Spain   More than a hundred years old, this two-apartment building set between party walls in the old quarter of Artá has been renovated and enlarged in the wake of a painstaking detailed study focused on reusing existing elements. The project came to fruiti

Marmolbravo MADhel   Spain   Located in the Puente de Vallecas district, the SFJ6 residential complex commissioned by EMVS (Madrid’s municipal housing and land corporation) counts 102 social-housing units, four commerical spaces at ground level, and 109 garage slots. With a tota

Taller Básico de Arquitectura MRM arquitectos   Spain   In Mutilva, a town belonging to the municipality of Valle de Aranguren, Navarre, this social housing development takes an L shape opening out to views of the landscape while shielding itself from north winds. Rising on a concrete base, the building u

Narch Arquitectes Maira Arquitectes dataAE   Spain   The residential building on Carrer Palamós is integrated into an urban fabric of La Trinitat Nova, a Barcelona neighborhood characterized by isolated blocks. Volume-wise, it presents a series of setbacks that break up the large scale of the developme

LLOC arquitectes   Spain   With Itziar Lafuente and Adrián Talens at the helm, LLOC arquitectes were commissioned to build 48 subsidized housing units and an underground parking garage in the Magaluf area of the municipality of Calviá. Located in the southwestern coast of the

dataAE Xavier Vendrell   Spain   At the foot of the Collserola mountain range, in the Barcelona municipality of Sant Just Desvern, this social housing development presents continuous terraces on all its facades, which widen at the corners to form spaces in direct contact with the li

Vivas Arquitectos   Spain   This shelter in Barcelona’s Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district can take in a hundred homeless women. A work of the firm VIVAS Arquitectos (César Vivas and Cristian Vivas), it has a day center and a night center seeking to assist and accompany its residents

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   For the purpose of mitigating its visual impact, a building raised in the historical quarter of the town maintains the scale of neighboring constructions and uses traditional materials. Connected by an open gallery, two volumes are composed in terrac

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   An open block presents a low volume and a tower connected by a bioclimatic atrium thanks to which all the apartment units, meant to be rented out, face two directions. The artisanal bricks baked with biomass provide inertia to the inner void – which

Coll-Leclerc MiAS arquitectes   Spain   This residential complex of the Barcelona Municipal Institute for Housing and Refurbishment (IMHAB) is located in a zone of textile colonies established in the mid-19th century behind the hill of Montjuic. Here fabrics were dyed and dried on the mead

Ayllón Paradela De Andrés   Spain   The ‘H.E.Co, Híbrido Ecolóxico Cohabitacional’ scheme drawn up by Javier Alejo Hernández Ayllón, Verónica Paradela Pernas, and Javier de Andrés de Vicente has won the ideas competition for a mixed-use building in the Barreiro neighborhood of the city

Javier de las Heras Solé   Spain   This residential development rises at the corner of Cuba street and Antoni Picornell square in Palma’s Es Molinar neighborhood. Starting from formal premises of orthogonality, the building presents a solid base of marés, Majorca stone, which contains

Harquitectes   Spain   In Gavá, a municipality in Barcelona province, in the comarca of Bajo Llobregat, this residential complex takes the form of three stepped volumes to adapt to the natural slopes of the terrain. With a built area of 16,509 square meters, the project se

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The Barcelona practice of Marta Peris and José Manuel Toral was commissioned by the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI) to build this residential complex in Ibiza. It is designed to get the best in terms of sunlight and sea views as well as to harness

dataAE Narch Arquitectes Maira Arquitectes   Spain   This social housing block is organized around an atrium-like central void, optimizing energy efficiency while creating opportunities for encounters among neighbors in the same way that the large landings of the stairs do. Undertaken for the Institut

MADhel Marmolbravo   Spain   Miguel Herraiz and Daniel Bergman – MADhel – and Marina del Mármol and Mauro Bravo – Marmolbravo – built these publicly subsidized rental dwellings for EMVS, Madrid’s Municipal Housing and Land Company, in the eco-neighborhood of the city’s Puente de

08014 arquitectura    Spain   Promoted by the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI), this public-housing block is located at Platja d'en Bossa, south of the city of Ibiza. Designed by estudi08014 – Adrià Guardiet and Sandra Torres – the apartment building pursues a certain degree o

Joan J Fortuny Giró Alventosa Morell Arquitectes   Spain   This residential development of the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI) rises on a rectangular plot with 54 dwellings above ground – distributed in three levels opening out to terraces or private gardens – and parking underground. Adapting to the very

Arenas Basabe Palacios   Austria   The Madrid firm Arenas Basabe Palacios, in association with the engineers of Buschina & Partner, was commissioned to build 11 blocks for a total of 82 apartments in Wildgarten, a new neighborhood in Vienna’s Meidling district. The succession of build

Ripoll Tizón Estudio de Arquitectura   Spain   The building is located between the residential area of the marina of Ibiza and an area of floodable and cultivated land. The urban context is heterogeneous in character, with buildings for leisure and tourism combined with housing blocks and vacatio

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   Born out of the Cheap Housing Law of 1929, the Bon Pastor neighborhood went up with 784 one-level homes. Impelled by the Barcelona City Hall's IMHAB (Institut Municipal de l'Habitatge i Rehabilitació), the Bon Pastor Redevelopment Plan involves demol

Christ & Gantenbein   France   More than a hundred social housing units rest on a refurbished base with technical workshops of the RATP (Parisian transport office). The overlapping functions determine the position of the entrances, the vertical circulations, and the resulting urba

Totem Arquitectos Asociados (TAAs)   Spain   The Carabanchel district is the location of this project of the Municipal Housing and Land Company (EMVS), an agency under Madrid’s City Hall. Close to huge urban voids like the Cuatro Vientos airport, which counteract the city’s heat island effect i

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has named 85 Social Housing in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona), an 85-unit timber-framed social housing development designed by Peris + Toral Arquitectes, as the winner of the RIBA International Priz

The Economist   Peter Barber’s work offers a chance for a meeting of minds. On mcgrath road, a side street in Stratford, east London, a 26-dwelling modernist terrace in mustard-coloured brick surrounds a square. The development (pictured) is hard to pigeonhole. Pete

A sensitive interpretation of the genius loci: this is how one could describe the social housing developent that the studio Oliver, Reina, Martín, Moyà & Garcías has executed in Son Gotleu, one of the poorest, most vulnnerable among the neighborhoods

530 Dwellings in Bordeaux Refurbishing the collective housing constructions built during the boom of the 1950s and 1960s is one of the main problems in European cities. A problem that, faced with common sense and talent, can lead to projects that are

Norwich Council Houses Given each year by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Stirling Prize distinguishes the best works built by British architects or studios in the European Union. In 2019 the award went to the council houses on

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-regulate

Among the numerous challenges of architecture in this day and age is to redensify and repurpose the industrial fabrics that cropped up and grew on what were then the outskirts of our cities, but which are now embedded and trapped in the very heart of

Unlike in the past, this year’s Stirling Prize of the Royal Institute of British Architects seems to have kindled consensus among critics. For example, Oliver Wainwright of the newspaper The Guardian considers the winning building – Goldsmith Street

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   Street of 105 homes hailed as high-quality architecture in its most environmentally and socially conscious form. One hundred years since the 1919 Addison Act paved the way for the country’s programme of mass council housing, the prize for the best ne

Vikram Bhatt   Balkrishna Doschi, a master of modernity and teacher of several generations of Indian architects, is the latest receipient of the Pritzker Prize. 

The most unique characteristic of this residential complex comprising twelve social housing units in La Alberca de la Záncara (Cuenca) is its low-cost – but very efficient – building system. These dwellings combine concrete blocks forming three-meter

An important problem in low-cost housing projects developed in rural environments is how these blend with their surroundings, and in this sense the construction system plays a crucial role. In the case of modestly sized dwellings, choosing load-beari

Jesús López Díaz   La vivienda social mínima catalizó los estudios pioneros de Rafael Leoz sobre la estandarización y las leyes de modulación geométrica del espacio, cuyo valor fue reconocido por Le Corbusier, Sert o Jean Prouvé.

Construir en los nuevos ensanches no es lo mismo que trabajar en tramas consolidadas: estas exigen el respeto al hecho urbano; aquellos piden códigos más libres que trascienden los convencionales de la arquitectura, apelando a los de otras disciplina

Sobre el chaflán de una antigua manzana industrial, Álvaro Soto y Javier Maroto han construido para la EMVS de Madrid un edificio de viviendas de realojo que resuelve la difícil geometría del solar mediante dos movimientos. Por el primero, los cuatro

Recuperar para la modernidad la edificación tradicional madrileña de las corralas —con sus galerías abiertas de acceso y sus balcones multifuncionales— fue uno de los objetivos que el equipo formado por Mónica Alberola, Luis Díaz-Mauriño y Consuelo M

En el barrio de Pardinyes, situado en una zona de Lérida con un pasado rural cercano, el estudio barcelonés de Jaime Coll y Judith Leclerc ha levantado un edificio de 44 viviendas sociales en régimen de alquiler (ver AV Monografías 147-148). Debido a

En 2006, el hoy desaparecido Ministerio de Vivienda convocó un concurso de ideas bajo el significativo nombre ‘Hacemos ciudad’, para el desarrollo de siete actuaciones residenciales innovadoras dentro del territorio español (véase AV Proyectos 17). E

En el Monte Hacho, el principal accidente orográfico de la ciudad de Ceuta, los sevillanos José Morales, Sara de Giles y Juan González Mariscal han levantado 127 viviendas de protección oficial, de las cuales 41 unidades son unifamiliares, y el resto

En el nuevo barrio de Móstoles Sur, abrazando premonitoriamente la llamada plaza del Sol, se alza un bloque de viviendas de directriz curva, con tramos de policarbonato azul y magenta que alberga 92 viviendas en régimen de alquiler temporal, locales

El edificio de viviendas de protección oficial más alto de España acaba de estrenarse. La torre Vallecas 20, en el área de Las Suertes, tiene 22 plantas y una altura total de 74 metros. Sus autores son María y José María Hurtado de Mendoza y César Ji

En el municipio madrileño de Villanueva de la Cañada, Mª José Aranguren y José G. Gallegos han terminado una promoción de 255 viviendas de alquiler con opción a compra; de ellas, 194 están destinadas a jóvenes, 51 a mayores de 35 años y el resto, a f

En la avenida de la Peseta, eje del nuevo ensanche del barrio madrileño de Carabanchel se alza un bloque semejante a un apilamiento de contenedores metálicos de colores brillantes. Se trata de las 82 viviendas de protección pública construidas por el

Julián Salas Serrano   De Habitat II a Habitat III