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Madrid: Screen stars and social housing
An important article about a great city that does not shy away from building interesting, connected and sustainable social housing developments. What do you think?
This article was originally found at ArchNewsNow.com
Find this article: RIBA Journal.Screen stars
July 2007
Foreign Office Architects came to international stardom with Yokohama Port Terminal. Now its low-cost social housing in Spain, and that takes imagination too. Words and photos by Hugh Pearman
here is the Madrid of the grand boulevards and fountains, the shady gardens, the pavement restaurants, the Prado with its new Rafael Moneo extension, the Reina Sofia museum with its Jean Nouvel addendum, the preposterous multi-starchitect-designed Hotel Puerta America. And we must not forget the Spanish capitals new portal to the world, Barajas Airports Stirling prize-winning Terminal 4 by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. All that is the Madrid of the tourist guides.
Then there is the other Madrid, where the tourists dont go the new suburbs, miles out, where the immigrants (and quite a few natives) flock. And it is in one of these, the massive new planned expansion of the Carabanchel district to the south-west, that Foreign Office Architects has built a social housing apartment block, set on a grass plinth and wrapped in opening bamboo screens. It is strange, beautiful, kinetic
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The block is aligned due north-south, and given a double-aspect narrow plan for cross-ventilation purposes. So except for units at the ends you can look both east and west. FOA describes the apartments in terms of 13.4m tubes connecting the two principal facades. Structural columns are incorporated into the walls between apartments. A further green aspect is the use of an impressive array of water solar heating panels on the roof, plus wind chimneys to internal bathrooms and kitchens.
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So Carabanchel 16 does brave and imaginative things with the typology of the low-cost social housing block. It rises above the prosaic nature of its brief. It manages to be both pioneering and pragmatic. ...
This article was originally found at ArchNewsNow.com
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