Social Housing In Carabanchel / coco arquitectos

Architects: coco arquitectos – Jorge Martínez and Laura Sánchez
Location: Madrid, Spain
Quantity Surveyors: David Gil and Juan Carlos Corona
Structural Advisor: Gogaite SL
Consulting Engineer: Geasyt SA
Project area: 20,000 sqm
Project year: 2007 – 2010
Photographs: Miguel de Guzmán, Ignacio Izquierdo & coco arquitectos

Outlying contexts surrounded by city border highways, fields, malls… require consistent answers. These are places where any action demands the same audacity, for example, a leaning building. The construction expresses with the language of kinetic, fitting its shape parallel to the slope while the ground floor retrieves the level of the plot defining streets.

typical dwelling

The building plan is a thin strip, with narrow apartments opened onto two different scenes: one side the city, the other the wide private garden. Every unit has a room which crosses from side to side, opening simultaneously to both of them. We seek for dwelling with blurred frontiers between spaces, where inner room shape can be changed, and with the presence of an extra room. A room floating outside the building, attached to the facade, large enough to accommodate any domestic activity.

We approach social housing from present society, where customizing your own house is a way to seek for individuality. In this context, the new room, freely set in the facade, expresses this new understanding: a random image with all elevation being unique, every single dwelling different from each other, and only the intervention of the users helping it to acquire significance.