MAIO Designs 40 Hierarchyless-Areas, Social Housing Models in Barcelona

MAIO Designs 40 Hierarchyless-Spaces, Social Housing Units in Barcelona

MAIO is currently building a five-story building with 40 social housing units in the Sant Feliu de Llobregat district, Barcelona. The project design urban connectivity, social equity, and sustainability. As the winner of a two-phase competition, the building will house hierarchyless, generic, flexible spaces to fit the inhabitants’ needs.

MAIO, based in Barcelona and New York, is an architecture firm characterized by a spatial approach to the complexity of changes in daily life, providing architectural responses that are “resistant, clear, and adaptable over time”, according to the authors.

The new building is located on a rectangular plot of 923 square meters (9,939 square feet) located in a suburban neighborhood that delimits to the northeast with industrial buildings, to the northwest with Anselm Clavé street and to the southwest-southeast with green spaces and common areas of a building of apartments. The ground floor defines an interior passage that connects the street and the park, providing connectivity and integration between the two urban areas. In the same way, it also divides the area into two closed spaces for both commercial and public use.

The apartments are organized around a patio that passively regulates the interior temperature and ventilation, thus reducing energy consumption.

The shape of the project “follows the nature of its environment to achieve better integration”, according to the authors. Moreover, the facades are delimited by balconies that occupy the maximum surface area allowed by local regulations, limiting their presence to 50% of the façade. Strictly following a fan shape, the project extends the exterior surface of the apartments to the maximum allowed, thus defining large exterior spaces.

Client: IMPSOL – Área Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB)
Architects: MAIO
Directors: Anna Puigjaner, María Charneco, Guillermo López, Alfredo Lérida
Team: Martí Amargos, Julio Sánchez
Images: MAIO
Location: Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain
Year: 2018 – ongoing