La Chalmeta 32 Cooperative Housing / Pau Vidal + Vivas Arquitectos
+ 19
Text description provided by the architects. This project is the result of an open public call launched by the Barcelona City Council to change the use of land located in the Marina del Prat Vermell neighborhood, classified as VPO with surface right in favor of housing cooperatives for a minimum period of 75 years. The self-promotion and subsequent collective management by the Llar Jove Marina Prat Vermell SCCL cooperative involved the participation of 32 neighbors in the process (design, construction and use) generating the possibility of jointly projecting their specific needs, investing in the community dimension as one of the main values.
The volumetry of the building is aligned with the roads. It consists of two volumes of different heights, one of 4 and the other of 8 floors. The building solves the corner of the block by emptying the center of the volume, generating two bars of different heights with four courtyards between them. On each floor, the access walkway to the apartments is formalized in a single longitudinal axis that connects with the core of the stairs and elevators. These gateways promote interactions and become a transitional space between community and home. At an intermediate point in this route, the roof of the lower building functions as a terraced community garden and provides the building with a high quality green space. On the ground floor, the building can be accessed from Calle Ulldecona, through an exterior passageway that communicates with the public space inside the block through a courtyard for parking bicycles. Community use premises occupy the rest of the spaces on the ground floor, housing a multipurpose community space, a kitchen-dining room and lounge for groups, a coworking space, a laundry room and a food distribution space which also operates as a consumer cooperative. All these spaces are located around the two courtyards accessible from the ground floor.
Housing is understood as a set of non-hierarchical spaces in this project. The layout is an organizing mesh where all spaces start from a homogeneous dimension and are configured in a pattern that fills and empties the building. The apartments are grouped on either side of the passageway and adopt different types of accommodation with 1, 2 and 3 bedrooms. Inside the apartments, the modular spaces follow one another from the access to the street facade. Grouping, combining and closing rooms are the possibilities of use that this flexible typology allows. All apartments have cross ventilation through the interior courtyards, which in turn will allow the introduction of southern light inside the building. The project incorporates bioconstruction, healthy design and energy efficiency criteria, and is connected to the urban production and distribution network of Ecoenergias (Central Marina, biomass power plant) for heating and domestic hot water.
