SHELTER FOR HOMELESS WOMEN
This new facility is built above Plaça Kennedy in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district of Barcelona, on the same plot where the original refuge was located. It includes a day centre and a night centre with the capacity to accommodate 100 homeless women.
Until recently, shelters for homeless people were still regarded as emergency facilities to provide an urgent response to the basic needs of the greatest number of residents possible.
Now, this approach has changed to focus on more individualized attention, accompanying each resident towards various social, work, educational and medical resources to enable them to rebuild an independent life.
From this viewpoint, seeing the centre as a halfway house for the reintegration of these women into society, the project has three aims:
TO GENERATE A SAFE SPACE
A refuge isolated from the city that guarantees users’ privacy, with a perimeter garden that acts as a filter.
SOCIALIZATION SPACES
The project is laid out with porches, glazed balconies, terraces and meeting spaces to encourage interaction between residents, who can use these intermediate spaces as and when they choose.
FEELING OF HOME
The aim was to maximize a feeling of home and avoid the appearance of a social care facility thanks to the warmth of the interior materials and the domestic scale of the spaces.
The volume is determined by the needs of the brief and the separations of 8 m from the street and 5 m at the sides and the back. The building is therefore designed as a single element, a rectangular prism some 60 m long and 16 m wide, with a maximum height of 9 m subdivided into three floors. However the volume is emptied out at points to generate porches, terraces and other outdoor spaces that create an extrovert building that looks from the inside outwards.
The functional organization of the centre takes the form of large programmatic packages that ensure clear, simple functioning for workers and users alike. The two stairways serve to articulate the different areas of the facility.
Thanks to a series of passive strategies, including very good insulation, thanks partly to the timber, and adjustable awnings that regulate automatically according to temperature and solar incidence, we have designed a nearly zero-energy building with BREEAM Excellent rating.
