125 SOCIAL HOUSING UNITS
The project, winner of a First Prize in a public competition, realizes the construction of 125 social housing units in Pítamo Sur, Seville, under a fundamental premise: the dignifying of social housing through an honest architecture that is sensitive to its context. The project embraces the extreme geometry of the plot—a strip 200 meters long by barely 11.40 meters wide—not as a restrictive limitation, but as the main generator of a high-performance passive bioclimatic strategy, demonstrating that efficiency and comfort are not at odds with cost optimization.
This minimal plot width imposes a double-bay structural solution which, far from being a drawback, becomes a virtue: it guarantees cross-ventilation in all units, an optimal factor for thermal comfort in the local climate. The implementation responds to the urban environment through a marked material and functional duality. The West façade, housing the night zone, is resolved with white exposed brickwork and deep vertical ventilation slits for the stairwells, offering thermal inertia, acoustic protection, and a solid image that dialogues with the local construction tradition.
In contrast, the East façade, facing Avenida del Flamenco, opens up radically through a system of continuous terraces and large voids. These spaces act as a solar filter and a thermal buffer, but their function goes beyond the climatic: their arrangement fragments the length of the block, generating a rhythm of solids and voids that avoids the perception of a monotonous, infinite built front, breaking the linear scale to make it more pedestrian-friendly.
The building section absorbs the existing topography (a North-South slope of 1.26 m) by subtly staggering the floor slabs in groupings of three entrance cores. This decision optimizes the access level and settles the building onto the terrain naturally. On the ground floor, vehicular access to the two parking levels is located at the ends of the building, avoiding costly mechanical systems.
Typologically, the column-based structure frees up the floor plan, allowing for integral flexibility: the 2, 3, and 4-bedroom units are interchangeable and combinable. This characteristic grants the building temporal resilience, allowing the future reconversion of two adjacent units to adapt the public housing stock to the inevitable evolution of family units.
