The public housing project with affordable rent for young people and the space for the Colla Castellera Jove of Barcelona [human tower team] Can Fabra has been chosen as a finalist of the “Panorama of Architecture and Urban Planning Works”, at the Spanish Architecture and Urban Planning Biennial Awards.
The project, developed by the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Housing and Renovation and built in the industrial warehouses of the Fabra i Coats complex, in the neighbourhood of Sant Andreu del Palomar, has been one of the 70 projects chosen to pass to the final round, which will award 20 as the most relevant in terms of Spanish architecture and urban planning over the last few years. Highlights of the project by the Roldán Berengué architects’ firm is the renovation and preservation of the industrial heritage to re-use its physical, spatial and historic qualities and reinforce the nature of the original building. It also highlights the development of social housing and affordable rent in the city. In this sense, it has highlighted the contribution to the neighbourhood of more than 28,000 m2 in social housing and facilities.
Another project in the 70 finalists is La Borda, a project that recovers Can Batlló, an old industrial complex from the end of the 19th century in the Sants-Montjuic neighbourhood, on a plot of land transferred by Barcelona City Council for 75 years. This project, in which the Lacol cooperative of architects took part, became the first new co-housing building in the city of Barcelona.
The Spanish Architecture and Urban Planning Biennial Awards will be held for the first time in two locations in tandem: from 28 June to 16 September, at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, and from 2 July to 10 October at the Herreniano Patio of the Spanish Contemporary Art Museum in Valladolid. Under the slogan “Empty Spain, full Spain. Strategies for conciliation”, this year’s event proposes approaching the diverse territorial reality with the aim of outlining similarities and differences that enable common areas regarding territory, society, sustainability, gender, demographics, collectivity and economy to be defined. Social reality and access to housing are, therefore, key issues in this biennial. As the judges state, the chosen works “respond to society’s challenges, which are connected and rooted in the places they are found and which provide solutions to improve the social and cultural context in which they work”.