20VPO - 20 Social Housing Units
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This building for 20 rental social housing units is resolved by paying attention to scale and proportion and taking into account the strict parameters that this kind of project entails, rigid local planning regulations as well as a very limited budget.
The setting, an area of new developments in Conil, is defined by an informal settlement of homes, a noticeable slope, the future presence of the bus station and the layout of a ring road with its unavoidable roundabout. We could say that it is the typical generic landscape of almost any Andalusian town's periphery, the result of the kind of urban planning that followed the precepts of the construction boom of the first decade of the 21st century. Given this context, we gave shape to a building that needed to be adequately inserted into an area of complex relationships between diverse residential typologies and urban uses, as well as determining topographical and volumetric transitions.
At another level of the design, the housing unit and its assemblage had to be simple and repetitive, in order to comply with budgetry and regulatory conditions. We solve the typology itself following a single-bay, cross-ventilated layout. Their assembly produces two geometrically defined blocks whose shape and structural layout optimize both the usable and the built surface area on every floor — including the parking and commercial semi-basement— while also liberating part of the site in order to create a small public space preceding one of the building's entrances.
The clarity that the floor plans express, crossed with our reading of the planning codes, gave us flexibility when it came to composing the final volumes, allowing us to avoid materializing what per se could have been a generic block. Consequently we broke the building up and tiered it following the slope of the ring road, we approximated its size to that of the preexisting dwellings and we fragmented it further on its uppermost floor both to create a smaller housing typology and to provide rhythm to the longitudinal elevation facing what will be the future bus station. This adaptive approach was also applied to the composition of the openings on the different façades. Moreover, their sizes, proportion and amount are maximized, which permitted us, among other things, to have two differently oriented window openings in each living room. Repetition and variation define the building's compositional traits.
The general layout produces a series of intermediate spaces —potential meeting places. The small public space, the set-back entryway and, within the building, a patio which is gazed upon by the two galleries that connect each pair of the building's bays. These passageways, which accommodate the stairwells and elevators, have also been conceived as intermediate spaces. They are semi-open and they have their own atmosphere and identity, produced by the small perforations which dot the space with light and by the large circular openings that, in a surprising twist, characterize the interior façades of the building.
In another aspect of the design's interpretation of this cityscape, the utmost care was taken to the inevitable appearance of equipment and other elements on its rooftops. In an act of reconciliation with what they mean, instead of hiding these features, we underlined their presence, using a clearly differentiated language from that of the white volumes of the building itself. These volumes, the rooftop elements, the circular perforations and openings as well as subtle details in the window openings, the combination of whites and grays, or the lettering used make up the building's identity.
We were commissioned this project after winning a competition. It was carried out and built, including the small changes that are usual in such processes, within the tight budget it had been tendered at and the established construction timetable.
The result is a residential building whose essential features are made the most out of, a play of discreet white volumes in Conil's radiant light. They are already inhabited; these houses have begun to become homes.
