135 Social Apartments, Torrent

OAB (planning stage): Carlos Ferrater and Xavier Martí

Peñín Arquitectos: Alberto Peñín 

Alejandro Marqués (GIA, Structural Engineer)

Rafael Corell y Sergio Bori (Facilities Engineers)

Ismael Rius Gumbau y Enrique Ferrer Vázquez (Building Engineers)

Pablo Peñín and Sergio Morant (Peñín Arquitectos)

The project starts reconsidering two areas of the urban gate of the city of Torrent, in the access from Valencia. Through the attention to the urban and metropolitan scale the volumes are reorganized. On the basis of the ground ownership structure it is proposed a crescent with 4 needles and a civic center with 3 asymmetrical towers.

The social house building is articulated around the inner courtyard, a common space of life and accessible between the interstices of the volumes, the three blocks of 4 layers and the tower of 15 storages. Most of the houses have cross ventilation and membranes of thermal regulation.

The urban experience developed with the city hall, oblige to many agents to participate: constructors, owners, architects, engineers. Therefore the city is built through negotiation and collective effort that are translated in several urban rules.

The volume, the architecture, the material…event the constructive detail belong to a strategy at the same time urbanistic, typological and material. The access, the geometry and the first layers of materials are the same, giving freedom to the inner distribution. White Glass Reinforce Concrete Panels (GRC), concrete or steel brise soleils, seek diversity.

Icon is finally a consequence of the construction of the city and the social housing.