✕

When architects and urbanists think of Barcelona, the city’s octagonal blocks—and architects’ inventive responses to them—immediately come to mind. It was civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà who envisioned this now-famous plan, first realized in 1860 in what became the bustling Eixample district. As the Catalan capital grew and implemented more of the grid, it started to swallow up nearby villages. By the time it reached Sant Martí, in 1897, the community there felt the size of Cerdà’s blocks was too big, resulting in something of a hybrid urban condition that still exists in the neighborhood today.

“This road was once called Camí Antic de Valencia, the old exit to Valencia,” says architect José Toral, gesturing to a path that cuts through the block where his firm’s latest housing project stands. “Many places in this area of the city have these leftover passages, which divide the blocks in half and are considered more like public streets than the private courtyards of Cerdà’s plan.” The apartment building his firm designed sits at a crossroads of sorts, where the palimpsest of Sant Martí and the recently developed innovation district known as 22@ begin to intersect. Rather than enclose the block, Toral and partner Marta Peris kept the historic route accessible, while also celebrating the urban feature most associated with Barcelona’s identity: its chamfered city grid.

The facade increasingly pulls away from the building every few floors, click to enlarge. Photo © José Hevia, click to enlarge.

Greenh@use, an eight-story, 140-unit building, is the largest undertaking to date by the seasoned housing architects Peris+Toral, as well as the clearest expression of its founders’ prowess in multifamily-residential design. Encased within a heavy but highly reticulated facade, Greenh@use presents a unified front to passersby. This is merely a mask—in fact, the architects neatly combined three entirely separate programs, each with differing needs and unit layouts, into one building: senior housing on the uppermost three floors, affordable rentals on the middle four, and temporary accommodations for refugees and the homeless on the ground level.

The project is the result of a 2018 competition organized by the Institut Municipal de l’Habitatge i Rehabilitació de Barcelona, an agency charged with constructing housing within the city’s bounds. “I think we won because we organized one building on top of the other, rather than propose three side by side,” Toral muses. By doing so, they could organize every unit around a dynamic, hyper-dense atrium, doused in sunlight and, in stark contrast to the weighty béton exterior, filled with blond timber, muted terrazzo, and dazzlingly thin metal elements.

1

2

The interiors feature pine and terrazzo (1 & 2). Photos © José Hevia

At the corner, Greenh@use’s structural exoskeleton deepens and rotates, forming a westward-oriented brise soleil that is counterbalanced by a solid (but ribbed) stairwell core and a seven-story-tall void. “The chamfer is the most important part of buildings in this city, but it’s also very difficult from a planning perspective,” says Toral. The decision to place communal lounges here was practical as well as aesthetic, explaining the dramatic and abstract composition facing the street. The brise soleil filters daylight through to the atrium but also frames panoramic views back toward Barcelona, with the Sagrada Família piercing the skyline in the distance.

A gridded facade rotates to form a brise soleil and an abstract corner condition. Photo © José Hevia

On the ground floor, this hinge accommodates two separate lobbies—one for the rental tenants and another for the seniors—while the transitional housing, intended only for six-month stints, is accessed farther down the block. Some might bristle at this divided organization, but it positions on-site staff to best support residents and their diverse needs.

Residents can enter the building at its triangular corner, where stairs and elevators are located. Photos © José Hevia

In Spain, it’s estimated that about one-fifth of the population is over 65 years of age, one of the highest percentages in the world. Says Toral, “There is a frequently posted public-health advisory that quotes an elderly person saying, ‘the worst part about getting old is the loneliness.’” Tackling this sense of isolation was top of mind. On the fifth floor, unit plans were configured specifically to accommodate intergenerational living. But, more significantly, each apartment is fronted by a permeable wood box that functions as a kind of porch, providing semiprivate space for residents to spend time outside their units, talk to passing neighbors, and even dry their clothes.

Taken together, the porches line a pedestrian street that is repeated on each floor—like a sliver of American suburbia, but denser, walkable, and more vertical—recalling James Wines’ speculative Highrise of Homes. These elevated thoroughfares, crossing through the chasm, create a mesmerizing enfilade, where views and neighborly conversation cut across the same floor, as well as above and below. Apartments for seniors, at the topmost floors, feature fewer bedrooms and are shallower, allowing the planted atrium to widen at its upper reaches and increase the amount of daylight that trickles down.

In addition to its social purpose, the atrium serves an important thermodynamic one—it is neither heated nor air-conditioned, reducing the building’s overall energy use. On a hot day in August, on a tour of the project with Toral, the space felt pleasantly warm. Automated louvers near the timber-truss-supported skylights open and close, depending on the season and weather, forming a solar chimney, a device Peris+Toral has skillfully deployed in other projects. In the summer, the space vents hot air and “generates airflow of about 1.5 meters (5 feet) per second,” Toral explains. “Every half meter amounts to about 1 degree Celsius in thermal comfort.” Units can also open atrium-facing windows for cross ventilation. In the winter, warm air is retained.

3

Timber trusses (3) support skylights above the atrium, which is planted at its base (4). Photos © José Hevia

4

The architects further reduced the project’s carbon footprint by specifying precast concrete, which could be more easily molded into structurally optimized geometries (such as ribbed slabs). Once assembled on-site, discrete elements were locked together with a final in situ pour of about 2 inches. This decreased the amount of concrete needed by about 50 percent, says Toral. “But we worried about the repetitiveness of the precast facade grid.” Subtleties in the design help mitigate this—while the structural exoskeleton floats in front of it, the building steps back every few floors to create deeper balconies, adding depth and shadow.

Even when constrained by a tight budget, Peris+Toral has demonstrated an aptitude for innovative and inventive housing models. Certainly Spain is not alone in having a large percentage of elderly people—many other European nations, as well as Japan and the United States, rank high. Lurking not far behind the affordability crisis is the one stemming from a shortage of housing stock that can comfortably and safely accommodate an increasingly older population. Why not look to models, like this one, that can tackle both issues at once?

Click plans to enlarge

Click section to enlarge

Click detail to enlarge