El Besòs i El Maresme is not what most people envision when they think of Barcelona. The neighborhood lacks the meandering gothic quality of las Ramblas, and it falls outside Ildefons Cerdà’s chamfered-square-gridded Eixample, which unified the city at the turn of the last century. El Besòs i el Maresme is a working-class community built up in the 1950s and ’60s, and much of the housing stock reflects this—repetitive, bar-shaped apartment blocks with nondescript architecture abound. But a new 54-unit social housing complex on Carrer de Lluís Borrassà, designed by local firm Peris+Toral, shows that apartment buildings can be far more dignified, even on a budget.
The seven-person firm, led by the husband-and-wife team of Marta Peris and José Toral, has developed a specialty in social housing, much of it built in Catalonia and on the Balearic Islands. Borrassà, a commission won through a competition in 2016, is part of a longstanding effort dating back to the 1990s to reinvigorate the surrounding area, with such projects as Parc Diagonal Mar (2002) by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, and the Fòrum Building by Herzog & de Meuron (2004), only a few blocks farther south.
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