Centurión Social Housing

Public housing has the capacity to promote exemplary architectures that, with limited resources, fulfill a responsible performance of environmental sustainability, both in its construction and during and after its useful life, but, at the same time, provide a friendly and comfortable setting for the development of domestic life for its inhabitants. Meeting both objectives is the purpose of this project.

A single core morphology and horizontal circulation gallery is proposed. The economic advantages in the construction and maintenance of the building that it offers are obvious, but it also allows the access to the homes to be converted into a small spatial event, in a bright, rich route equipped with small green spaces and relationships. On the other hand, this arrangement guarantees clear cross ventilation between the street and the large interior patio of all the homes, essential in a climate like that of La Laguna.

The structural, construction and installation systems are designed to allow maximum freedom and flexibility in the distribution of the homes. On a system of metal pillars and beams located on both facades rest prefabricated cellular slabs of just over ten meters that completely free the interior of the homes from structure. The careful positioning of the wet rooms and vertical drainage ducts allows us to offer different housing layouts on the ground floor and on the three upper floors.

The construction combines the resources of traditional architecture with contemporary industrialized procedures with the aim of reducing execution times and costs, in addition to significantly reducing energy consumption. Strong thermal insulation, adaptable solar protection, cross ventilation in all homes and a fortunate good south orientation of the plot guarantee optimal energy performance of the building. The system of galleries, balconies, shutters and lattices, which alludes to the traditional architecture of La Laguna, filters the system of relationships between interior and exterior spaces and provides the building with an optimistic and luminous image.

Special attention has also been paid to small non-normative design details that make the homes a more ideal place for people with reduced accessibility, such as the design of openings and balconies that allow visibility of the outside from a wheelchair, the positioning in height of mechanisms and locks.