Social Housing buildings in Elche

Elche. Spain | 2022

Valencian Housing and Land Entity

The contemporary housing project must advance on the concept of the open house. Just as the sociologist Richard Sennett has claimed the same quality for the design of cities, a design that must incorporate the complexity and diversity, the variable and mutable nature of urban life, the same must be done with collective housing. We must achieve domestic structures capable of being easily adapted, built, and maintained, a typology in keeping with the liquid condition of society. The project gives shape to and materializes these challenges through the concept of the Revolving House. It proposes a residential type of symmetrical bays that develops openly around a functionally fixed nucleus, formed by the home or kitchen, the place for meeting and eating together, as well as personal hygiene. The rest of the house is made up of dimensionally identical spaces around it, capable of becoming rooms for intimacy, a living area or an area for teleworking and personal development. Finally, the house is completed with two outdoor areas, ambiguous limits capable of being incorporated into the domestic activity and which stimulate relations between the interior and the exterior. The typology is dimensioned in such a way that it can revolve around its central axis, achieving a house that is doubly oriented and spatially and functionally palindromic.