Monte Pedral Housing

The starting idea treats space as something perceived through subtraction, closer to how Eduardo Chillida worked positive and negative form against each other than to how a housing block is normally drawn. Circulation reads as the low-density void; the rooms people actually occupy read as the dense material around it. Bathrooms, kitchens, stairs and lifts are grouped into utility volumes that don’t just serve the plan but organise movement through it, working as obstacles that shape the internal routes, in the shared corridors and inside each apartment alike. The same logic runs across the façade, built from three repeating modules that control where openings fall, mediating between the interior and the street while protecting privacy and daylight. The variety visible from outside comes from a repetition tied directly to how the wall is built.

Each floor is organised around containing internal galleries that reach more apartments per level than a conventional corridor would, avoiding the dead-end isolation that comes with long single-loaded access. Shared atria break up that route and give neighbours a reason to cross paths without compromising the privacy of any one flat. The building is layered into three registers (public, shared and private) stepping down with the fall of the site across separate platforms instead of forcing one flat ground plane. Parking, retail and housing knit together gradually at the base, keeping each use in contact with the public space around the block. A raw, unfinished palette of screeded floors and painted render carries through the shared areas, reinforced by a gridded, legible façade that shows which parts of the building are lived in and which are shared.

The apartment types follow the same logic. Every unit, from the smallest studio to the largest family flat, grows from the same base module of bathroom, kitchen, storage and laundry, with bedrooms and extra utility modules added as the typology scales up. Wet zones sit close to the horizontal access routes, keeping every other room naturally ventilated and cutting how much the building leans on mechanical systems. Every apartment, whatever its size, opens onto a balcony that extends the daytime rooms outward.

Underneath all of this sits a single geometric element: the portico, setting out both the minimum unit of the façade and the structural logic of the building. Running fabrication and site work in parallel, instead of in strict sequence, is expected to cut construction time by around 40% against a conventional build.