“When we founded our practice, Office for Political Innovation, we were hoping to prove that architecture could have a direct impact on the political structure of a place like Spain,” says the firm’s Madrid-born, New York–based principal Andrés Jaque. “With time, we discovered that the niche in which we could operate was very much the space of dissidence.”

Located in a suburban development outside the small town of Molina de Segura, in Spain’s southern province of Murcia, this project is just such an act of subversion. Like so many housing developments in the country, this one seems to have been slapped down arbitrarily on the arid hilly landscape, its grid of hard, impermeable streets taking little or no account of topography, its regular lots filled with cookie-cutter neo-Mediterranean villas or catalogue-bought Modernist knockoffs. Imported palm trees, swimming pools, and plastic lawns proliferate in the windy climate.