A triangular plot of land – specifically, an isosceles triangle, very acute at one of its angles – presents its difficulties when it comes to planning. But it also has some advantages. The Coll-Leclerc and Miàs Architects teams thought more about the second than the first and opted for this Imhab competition in the Marina del Prat Vermell to build 72 social homes on a plot of difficult construction. They won it and discovered, during the design process, that the problem was actually an opportunity.
These seventy-two homes all have a minimum of two facades, with their corresponding corner, so they often have views of two streets and are flooded with light. Given that they are social, and that the smallest ones measure just over forty meters, one cannot speak of a bad result, but quite the opposite.
The way in which the designers achieved their objectives was by opening two streets on the North-South axis, six meters wide, which divide the development into three blocks and, then, they avoided the problems derived from irregular floor plans by placing the terraces – two per home – at the ends, to recover a certain orthogonality when distributing the spaces. The operation has had a happy result.
The twelve floors on each of the six floors have a different distribution, but with similar results. They are atypical distributions, but there is no bad floor. Some are larger than others – between 40 and 100 square meters – but all are pleasant, sunny and with cross views. Although some of the corners of the complex may be sharper than that of the New York Flatiron, the paradigm of sharp corners, from inside the homes the geometric difficulty of the divisions on the floor plan is noticeable, but not much. Furthermore, cross ventilation comes, with this peculiar distribution, in a natural way.
The Marina del Prat Vermell, where this new, recently completed housing complex is located, owes its name to the old cotton or linen fabric factories that often took on a reddish hue, and which, when dried, lay on the fields. They were dyed that color. Evoking such a history, this housing development is covered in corrugated concrete plates tinted red. Panels and stairs also show off this color, which gives the whole a pop look.
