JUAN HERREROS

Architects: estudioHerreros

Location: Sant Boi, Barcelona

Year: 2009-2019

Images/text from: http://estudioherreros.com/

By the Architects:

The program —which mixes social housing and market housing in a coexistence without differences— practically demands the filling of the available volume. This limitation, together with the demands of efficiency and simplicity that we want to impose on ourselves, represent a challenge for the development of a project with some added value. To this end, we look for the hidden powers of a proposal that is pragmatic but sensitive to slight external stimuli. We start by laying out a typical floor of 12 homes. We need to sacrifice the minimum surface area in communications, so we chose to insert a single central core equipped with two interlocking “scissors” type staircases, two lifts and two installation cores. We will therefore have a single public entrance and a single centralization of connections on the ground floor that will affect the cleanliness of the commercial space and the underground parking. Regarding the dwellings, all the living rooms and bedrooms are exterior, while accesses, kitchens and bathrooms enter onto hallways that are shared by every three dwellings. From this scheme that solidifies the available volume, subtraction operations are carried out that allow a new morphology to be sculpted, generating generous collective and individual terraces and facilitating cross ventilation, diagonal views and lightening the original density, that orient the building towards its most attractive landscapes. The exterior facades are repetitive and closed by means of an external ventilated industrial panel sheet to achieve an unequivocal and monumental image of the volume fortunately surrounded by public space. The facades of the courtyards and corridors have a quasi-picturesque nature with latticework, tiling and ceramic tile flooring with a long tradition in Catalonia.

Architects: estudioHerreros

Location: Vitoria Gasteiz, Spain.

Year: 2006

Images/text from: http://estudioherreros.com/

By the Architects:

Four towers are the result of slivering the two massive buildings envisioned in the original masterplan. Framing Salburua’s main axis, these rise over the landscape, poking over the wetlands at their feet. Each tower’s position is slightly tilted from one another’s, generating a cinematic experience and bestowing upon the sinuous park-drive which separates the city from the wetlands with a picturesque idiosyncrasy. Seven of the buildings’ levels (reaching a height from which the hill at the historical centre can be seen) host office spaces, while the rest are devoted to housing (providing dwellings with two or three façades), avoiding the typical private gardens in favour of absorbing the view of the wetlands below, concealing both parking facilities below the public ponds. A single window and a single opaque, enveloping material are the first steps to an extreme protocol of simplification, as a part of an integral bioclimatic plan in which the towers gather energy from the most favourable orientations, granting an optimal solar radiation exposure by means of their proportions.

Architects: estudioHerreros

Location: Marseille, France. 

Year: 2013-2020

Images/text from: http://estudioherreros.com/

By the Architects:

The Mistral Residential Complex is part of EuroMed, the development built in Marseille on the layout of the old port in accordance with the Master Plan drafted by Yves Lion. The plan develops the EcoCité concept, which seeks a well-settled ground plan of a certain density in which the streets and squares are clearly drawn, and an aerial plan in which the number of floors of the buildings is reduced and the distances between them are increased so that the homes can benefit from the long views, sunsets, and sea breezes. Our project focuses on this ascending shape of the prism section and the diverse depth of the facades that will create an essential piece of the architectural approach: the loggias with which each unit establishes a transitional space between the interior and the exterior. With this, we want living in EuroMed to offer the added value of the feeling of belonging to an urban enclave in which the succession: bustling streets – leafy gardens – intimate loggia – collective rooftop terrace – makes up the great architectural argument for making the act of living here a contemporary experience, deeply involved in urban culture and environmental sensitivity at the same time. As a social experiment, the project proposes, or rather “de-problems”, the coexistence of social housing and other free-market housing. This policy, which estudioHerreros has implemented in other projects (see Housing in Sant Boi, Barcelona) constitutes a manifesto about the differences invented by the prejudices that hinder the opportunities that many need. The profusion of collective gardens and terraces with rural and agricultural programs will encourage this meeting of children and adults in a community that architecture makes possible. All the rooms in the dwellings have a direct relationship to the loggia formed by a mixture of concrete panels whose texture becomes the pattern of the perforations of the light, and mobile pieces that regulate the protection and exposure to the climate of Marseille.