HTM 

The competition was asking to create sustainable solutions for a social housing project of 100 units within the new urban development through open blocks that was planned in the former colony of Our Lady of the Angels in Madrid. The project understands that sustainable is not about designing innovative, exceptionally expensive building systems, or about using materials whose effectiveness is still not proved to achieve a minimal improvement of comfort. These strategies are more typical of prototypes or small buildings where you can test those issues rather than a social responsible project of 100 units. For these project the strategy was the rational use of solutions that have already been tested by experience, and that can be properly integrated into the design process from the beginning. These solutions can achieve a significant optimization of the project and they will be the most reasonable path towards creating a sustainable project.
There are two issues that have become first in importance: ventilation and sunlight control. Instead of a compact block that is subdivided, we propose a building as a grouping of apartments that is created by adding independent buildings.
This grouping is performed so that the air and the sun can penetrate to the inside, ensuring permanent renewal of air.
Each unit is expressed volumetrically by a set of different scales, vertically and horizontally, so that the entire residential building is located in an intermediate scale between the single family housing and the urban block. All the rooms of the apartments: the living rooms and the bedrooms, are oriented to the outside streets, while bathrooms and kitchens do so to the inside courts. Between them, a distribution corridor provides extra light through the clothesline, which in turn provides additional ventilation.
The construction system develops several variations that allow the control of the solar exposure and the isolation. It integrates different possible scenarios, conforming a façade as a line that has the necessary thickness to characterize a space and not as a construction line that just provides the minimum continuous thickness.