Housing Tower In Europa Square

 Architects: Roldán + Berengué
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Project area: 7,660 sqm
Project year: 2005 – 2010
Photographs: Jordi Surroca

The tower E.I.O.5 is a project of social housing promoted by INCASOL and it is located in a new central zone known as Plaça Europa (Europa Square). The Europa Square, according to Albert Viaplana’s Project, it is shaped as the last nude in Llobregat’s direction of the squares se- quence that, approximately each kilometer, marking the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes.

The urban model of the Europa Square is a generous public space opened to each side of Gran Via which concentrates, with other buildings, 26 towers of tertiary and residential uses, publics and privates, between 15 and 20 floors. Tower 5 is located in the farthest crown from the Gran Via which runs half- undergrounded.

For all the buildings of this last ring, most of them public housing promoted by different clients, distribution laws in the master planning fix a maximum floor dimension of 24×24 m, as well as height in which should be located the first floor structure and the crowing point of the towers.

The piece  was an object of public client’s competition in February 2005. In our proposal rescaling the tower according to its position as a piece in the limit with the consolidate fabric of Hospitalet trying to visualize with the building a movement between Europa Square and the blocks of 5 floors that form the surrounding. Grouping together floors from 3 to 3, the image of the tower, perceived in some kind of cinematographic long plan, could approximate to a building of 5 floors of height.

Also transforming in frames of 10 meters height and different thickness. In order to be more accurate, the facade and windows, this last ones with a sequential number and modulated in pieces with similar dimensions to a door (0.8 x 2,10 m), succeeding in different planes with a depth that range between 50 cm and 1,2 meter and emphasises the concept of big inverted tribunes. In each section of the tower the first floor of every serial of 3 is a balcony.

The election of the elements for the facade’s assembly has been done paying attention to a comparative study of several constructive solutions which evaluated the origin of already recycled materials, its natural origin and the capacity for being recycled at the end of its useful life. Likewise, was also valuated the expense of fabrication energy and the recovered politics of the surplus energy genera- ted during the production process. Materially, the facade is constructed with a sheet of 8 mm of thickness of high pressure laminate panels hanging of hidden structure of recycled aluminium perfiles. Black frames are made of aluminium composite panels 4mm of thickness which brings equal resistance with a lower weight per m2 to any other material with the same features.

All materials used in the tower’s construction are 100% recyclable and specifically the ones used in the facade come from a 65% and 100% already recycled materials.

The tower is set in floor plane as two towers with T form circulation corridor and two scales in the extremes across the one illuminates the interior in the circulation zone. Every tower has two apartments of 69 m2 in the extremes and one of 56 m2 in the central position. Totally, the program is of 75 units. In this project, the apartment unit’s distribution begins in the 14th floor and keeps descending so the compacted residential volume from the superior floor releases a space of 3 levels height with a T form in the access. 

This piece, generous in volume and “sober” in measures and finishing materials, in its longest dimension it ends being a street with accesses in the extremes and has unusual dimensions for the building’s entrance hall of usual public housing buildings.

The facades as well as the space of the entrance hall, work like intermediate spaces of relation, shaping the community scale, between the individual and private scale of the houses and the public city scale.