Cornellà de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain
“We chose to work with wood due to the possibilities it offers for industrializing the structure of the building and improving both the quality of construction and the time it takes, and the positive reduction of emissions you get with a totally sustainable material”, explains José Manuel Toral, architect and co-founder of Peris+Toral Architectes.
85 Social Housing in Cornellà de Llobregat is the largest multi-family social housing project in Spain, erected by Peris+Toral Architectes and landscape architects AB Pasatgistes for the Instituto Metropolitano de Promoción de Suelo, consisting of 85 social dwellings on five floors, a total of 8,300 square meters of zero KM wood from the forests of the Basque Country.
85 Social Housing in Cornellà recently won the Best Multi-Family Housing of the Year Award at the 2022 Future House Awards from Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
The building is organized around a courtyard that articulates a sequence of intermediate spaces.
The bases of this new residential building are a matrix of communicating rooms that eliminates corridors to guarantee optimum use of the floor plan and the use of timber to enable the industrialization of elements, improved quality of construction, and a major reduction of deadlines and C02 emissions.
On the ground floor, a porch opens up to the city, anticipating the doorway of the building and filtering the relationship between the public space and the courtyard that acts as a small plaza for the community.
The four vertical communication shafts are situated at the four corners of the courtyard so that all the occupants converge and meet in the plaza, which represents a safe space from a gender perspective.
On the model floor, entry to the apartments is from the communication shaft and the private terraces that make up the ring of outdoor spaces that overlook the courtyard.
The building’s general floor plan is a matrix of communicating rooms.
There are 114 spaces per floor, all of similar dimensions, eliminating both private and community corridors to make maximum use of the floor space.
The server spaces are laid out in the central ring, while the rest of the rooms, of undifferentiated use and size (13 m2), in the façade, accommodate different forms of occupation.
The surface area and proportion allow generous corners as support that facilitates the appropriation of space.
The structure is mainly determined by setting 3,60m short spans, matching the matrix of rooms.
Therefore, multiple supports uphold CLT slabs: cross-laminated timber bearing walls in the façade and a system of laminated timber columns and beams in the central bays.
The structure is optimized by compensating momentums with multiple supports and cantilevers at all ends.
In order to achieve economic feasibility in social housing, the timber volume needed by built squared meters has been optimized down to 0,24m3/m2.
The façade’s construction system and the structure joints are both solved by mechanical bonds, avoiding the use of scaffolds.
The exterior building skin is built up with electro-welded wire mesh, holding/bearing sun shading and filtering sights.
By bending, this element improves steadiness and at the same time, it shapes the terrace’s handrail.
Project: 85 Social Housing in Cornellà
Architects: Peris+Toral Architectes SCCP
Lead Architects: Marta Peris and José Manuel Toral
Design Team: Guillem Pascual, Ana Espinosa, Maria Megias, Izaskun González, Miguel Bernat, and Cristina Porta
Landscape Architects: AB Pasatgistes
Client: IMPSOL- Instituto Metropolitano de Promoción de Suelo
Photographers: José Hevia
