The location is one of the densest working class neighborhoods of Sant Feliu de Llobregat. It arose around an old industrial fabric, and so compactly that factories and dwellings were arranged wall to wall. Demolishing one of the area’s last remaining plants to build an underground parking facility created a huge void, giving rise to the problem that this project sought to solve: what to do with the walls of the backyards of the houses, which before had been hidden. These walls are now the facade of a new urban space.

Ceramic was chosen as cladding for the existing walls. There was a need to work with a material that was economical but resistant to humidity and frosts, besides flexible and adaptable to the complex geometry of the party walls, as well as having colors that could bring up the memory of the zone’s industrial past.

With these objectives, the challenge was two-fold: on the one hand, to set in motion a manufacturing process that, while keeping within the budget, would allow enhancing the material’s resistance; on the other hand, to come up with a module and a geometric law that would permit bonding the lattice walls with the smallest possible number of pieces, but with sufficient richness to address all the cases that might arise along the 150 meters of party wall to be covered.

The first requirement was met with enameled ceramic of different colors, fired at high temperatures in order to make it less hygroscopic and increase its mechanical resistance. The second, by means of a self-supporting lattice consisting of four pieces: a cube of 20 x 20 x 20 centimeters and a rhombus of 20 x 13.5 centimeters, solid or perforated. The cube made it possible to optimize production: positioned frontally or backward it created different degrees of transparency, while placing it like a spigot on the lattice made the latter naturally able to follow the height variations of the party walls.