85 Social Houses in Cornellá

Description

This new building located in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona), which consists of 85 social housing units distributed over 5 floors,  has been built with a total of 8,300 m2 of KM0 wood from the forests of the Basque Country.The design of a matrix of communicating rooms, which eliminates corridors guarantee the maximum use of the floor plan. the use of wood works in favor of the possibilities of industrialisation, the improvement of the quality of the construction and the notable reduction of building timescales and C02 emissions. These  are the axes of this new social housing building designed by the Barcelona office Peris+Toral Arquitectes.The building is organized around a patio that articulates a sequence of intermediate spaces. On the ground floor, a portico open to the city anticipates the door of the building and filters the relationship between the public space and the community patio which acts as a small square for the community. Instead of entering directly and independently from the exterior facade to each hall of the building, the four vertical communication cores are located in the four corners of the courtyard, so that all the neighbors converge and meet in the courtyard-square. The dwellings are accessed through the private terraces that make up the crown of exterior spaces that overlook the patio. The general plan of the building is organized in a matrix of communicating rooms. There are 114 spaces per floor, and 543 in the building, of similar dimensions, which eliminate both private and community corridors to obtain the maximum use of the floor. The server spaces are arranged in the central ring while the rest of the rooms of undifferentiated use and size, about 13 m2, run along the façade offering different ways of living. Another terrace in the outer crown completes the spatial sequence, the enfilade of spaces interconnected by large openings, permeable to air, gaze and passage. The 85 homes are distributed in four groups and a total of 18 homes per floor.Four or five houses are articulated around the nucleus, so that all typologies have cross ventilation and double orientation. The dwellings consist of five or six modules, depending on whether they have two or three rooms. The open and inclusive kitchen is located in the central room, acting as a distributor piece that replaces the corridors, while making domestic work visible and avoiding gender roles.The dimension of the rooms, in addition to offering flexibility based on the ambiguity of use and functional indeterminacy, allows an optimal structural bay for the wooden structure. As it is social housing, in order to achieve economic viability, the volume of wood required per m2 of construction has been optimized to 0.24 m3 per m2 of built area.(Description provided by the architects)