A façade designed horizontally. 85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects
17/04/2024.
[MAD] Spain
metalocus, JORGE MARTINEZ
metalocus, JORGE MARTINEZ
Project description by Llps arquitectos
Where gentrification displaces the most disadvantaged, a resilient grouping of social housing promoted by the Madrid City Council through the EMVS defends itself against the urban adversity inherent in the growth of free-market housing. A home for everyone, for the most needy, and materialized with the utmost dignity of contemporary housing despite its regulated and adjusted price. A challenging task considering it's a vertical tower of 17 floors.
Where the pedestrian public space flirts with railway infrastructure space, emerges a village of 85 social housing units vertically arranged on a base of textured concrete on its ground floor.
This "vertical tower" completes a social project of EMVS housing blocks under ownership regime with another one under rental regime to allow for a social and family diversity program through temporary rotations of multiple family typologies: numerous, multi-nuclear, single-parent, single-person, etc.
85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects. Photograph by Javier Callejas Sevilla.
Nestled between party walls, the powerful white volume with geometric setback regulations on upper floors responds to the north orientation along its smooth surface, through an ordered and exponential multiplication of square openings that cater to the scale of its bedrooms, seeking the idea of Horizon-Ground, Horizon-Sky, and, to unfold throughout its geometry and undo the urban scale of its neighboring buildings. In this way, abstraction transcends the dimension of the context, providing it with another enriching spatial reference.
Conversely, the elevation to the South develops a complex system of setbacks and depths with a system of ceramic lattices that allows the daytime program of the housing units to protect itself from the sun and heat in summer and allow its passage indoors in more wintry times.
This depth system is organized through several diagonal spaces that run through the block in its entirety to allow, from the housing unit itself, capturing the scale of the territory through its horizontal visual escape; the scale of the urban group through its transversal vision and; that of its unitary scale of group housing, inhabiting its own terraces integrated into these sculpted thresholds in the volume.
85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects. Photograph by Javier Callejas Sevilla.
Thus, the idea of primordial neighborhood, of a system of spaces inherent to housing but of communal, neighborly relationship is recovered. Relationship in all directions: diagonally, vertically, and horizontally, all within the same urban alignment plane.
It is understood as if it were a system of vertical streets that traverse the proposal in a staggered and diagonal manner seeking that place of encounter and relationship between neighbors. A space that pays homage to German Siedlungen or Viennese Höfe but enhancing the concept of interrelation. Meeting in this outdoor terrace space allows, like the residents of a village, sitting at the door of their house to communicate with their own neighbors and expand social interaction so crucial in times of confinement.
LLPS ARQUITECTOS is an architecture study composed of the partners Eduardo Pérez Gómez and Miguel Ángel Sánchez García. Miguel Ángel Sánchez García is an architect from the Architecture Polytechnic of Madrid. Eduardo Pérez Gómez is an Architect from the Architecture Polytechnic of Madrid and a Design Associate Professor.
They have been guest professors and have imparted conferences at the Universities of Harvard (EEUU), the Polytechnic of Milan (Italy), the University of Nairobi (Kenya) and the University of Addis Abeba (Ethiopia) and others on a Spanish national level. Their work has been awarded eleven first prizes, among those; four on an international level stand out: the Multi-Purpose Palace of Gran Canary, the Psychology Faculty of Malaga, and recently the Intermodal Railway and Buses Complex, as well as the International Exhibition of the Spanish Pavilion in the Venice Biennial of Architecture in 2000.
They have developed works in different areas and programs, it should be pointed out: the Spots and Multi-Purpose Palace of Gran Canary, the Third-Commercial Hybrid Complex in Madrid, the Social Centre of Almoguea, a Block of social, private and single-family flats on a national level, as well as third and industrial Complex in developing areas. Their work has been displayed in many countries such as EEUU, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and France.