A façade designed horizontally. 85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects

Project description by Llps arquitectos

Where gentrification displaces the most disadvantaged, a resilient grouping of social housing promoted by the Madrid City Council through the EMVS defends itself against the urban adversity inherent in the growth of free-market housing. A home for everyone, for the most needy, and materialized with the utmost dignity of contemporary housing despite its regulated and adjusted price. A challenging task considering it's a vertical tower of 17 floors.

Where the pedestrian public space flirts with railway infrastructure space, emerges a village of 85 social housing units vertically arranged on a base of textured concrete on its ground floor.

This "vertical tower" completes a social project of EMVS housing blocks under ownership regime with another one under rental regime to allow for a social and family diversity program through temporary rotations of multiple family typologies: numerous, multi-nuclear, single-parent, single-person, etc.


85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects. Photograph by Javier Callejas Sevilla.

Nestled between party walls, the powerful white volume with geometric setback regulations on upper floors responds to the north orientation along its smooth surface, through an ordered and exponential multiplication of square openings that cater to the scale of its bedrooms, seeking the idea of Horizon-Ground, Horizon-Sky, and, to unfold throughout its geometry and undo the urban scale of its neighboring buildings. In this way, abstraction transcends the dimension of the context, providing it with another enriching spatial reference.

Conversely, the elevation to the South develops a complex system of setbacks and depths with a system of ceramic lattices that allows the daytime program of the housing units to protect itself from the sun and heat in summer and allow its passage indoors in more wintry times.

This depth system is organized through several diagonal spaces that run through the block in its entirety to allow, from the housing unit itself, capturing the scale of the territory through its horizontal visual escape; the scale of the urban group through its transversal vision and; that of its unitary scale of group housing, inhabiting its own terraces integrated into these sculpted thresholds in the volume.


85 high-rise social housing by Llps architects. Photograph by Javier Callejas Sevilla.

Thus, the idea of primordial neighborhood, of a system of spaces inherent to housing but of communal, neighborly relationship is recovered. Relationship in all directions: diagonally, vertically, and horizontally, all within the same urban alignment plane.

It is understood as if it were a system of vertical streets that traverse the proposal in a staggered and diagonal manner seeking that place of encounter and relationship between neighbors. A space that pays homage to German Siedlungen or Viennese Höfe but enhancing the concept of interrelation. Meeting in this outdoor terrace space allows, like the residents of a village, sitting at the door of their house to communicate with their own neighbors and expand social interaction so crucial in times of confinement.