The layout of the houses adopts a solution that transcends the usual traditional typologies. All the apartments have a façade that faces the block of houses’ inner courtyard, which offers the best sunlight for the living rooms. The bedrooms form a separate body, aligned with both streets, and connected to the inner body by long corridors. Both bodies are separated by an open courtyard that spans the entire building, from end to end. The corridors are of a greater importance in the distribution of the houses, since they have a lot of natural light and give more openness to the central residual space.
The main feature that stands out in this property, located in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood, is the fact that the houses on the standard floor are divided, through courtyards, into two independent parts, enabling a radical separation between the living room, with southern lighting, and the bedrooms, which overlook the street. In each apartment, these two areas are connected through passages that acquire the quality of intermediate space.
The project as a whole can be understood as a reinterpretation of the Eixample’s traditional typology of apartment building, developed in the late nineteenth century and constantly evolving since then. Some of the tangible features in the layout and in the project’s apartments, such as the depth, the day-night division or the courtyards of light, are in fact very present elements in the Eixample’s construction tradition.
The choice of materials, both in the windows’ woodwork and the masonry enclosures of the main façades, reinforces the traditional image of the building, which is far from the strictest modern movements’ canons. The influence of neo-liberty architecture that emerged in Milan in the 1950s is also clear, and it was very present at that time in Barcelona. This artistic movement, with exponents such as the architect Vittorio Gregotti or the BBPR studio, proposed a separation from the CIAM and opted for an Art Nouveau and Italian traditional architecture revival.
