The Jury valued that the project challenges the existing European housing stock from the post war period, using minimum means to achieve a maximum effect. Instead of demolishing, which involves the use of an important amount of energy, in this case the client understood and supported the advantages of transforming the existing three buildings. This has changed people’s lives for the better without underestimating their previous lives, filling the new volume with poetry because it works with the basis that people understand space and in consequence, they use it in very different ways.

At a moment in which the commissions for new social housing blocks ask for a reduction of the surface of flats, here the volume is increased, offering dignity and giving more value to the individual and to the collective. The ensemble becomes an optimistic opportunity for social housing and modernity, being generous and also changing architecture and the possibilities of architecture. The architects show a very high acknowledgement of who – a mix of inhabitants – and what – the results from previous research on transformation – they are working with. This results in a refined way of working with people, space and materials although the improvement in the collective could have been stronger if the opportunities in the relationship with the street would have been different.

SECOTRAP ingénierie (concrete structure)

CESMA (metalic structure)