Social Network: A trio of young architects enlivens a housing block for seniors by cleverly manipulating its facades and creating a series of community spaces.
One of the challenges in designing housing is finding a middle ground between monotonous repetition and arbitrary variety. For Torre Júlia, a 17-story municipal apartment building for senior citizens on the northern edge of Barcelona, a team of architects fresh out of architecture school—Ricard Galiana, Sergi Pons, and Pau Vidal—uses singular elements such as social spaces and circulation to cleverly navigate between these extremes. Developed after the trio won a 2007 competition for another project on the site that was subsequently canceled, their formal strategy is part of a larger aim to make the building into a community. “This is, after all, basically a social container,” explains Pons.
The design for the $9.7 million, 90,000-square-foot tower starts from a premise as boring as that for a speculative office block: a reinforced-concrete structure with a square footprint and repetitive horizontal ribbons of openings and spandrels finished in white corrugated aluminum. But the architects treat this basic volume as a neutral field over which they deploy a series of variations. The 77 rental units, which overlook the northwest and southeast exposures, are pulled back behind continuous terraces, converting the facades into a sun screen. Outdoor stairs run down the other two facades, selectively interrupting the spandrel bands with dramatic, Constructivist-looking diagonals that reveal planes of yellow and green behind them-part of a color-coding system that groups several floors together into communities around corner common rooms.
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