- 84 social housing units un a low-rise building and 70 un a high-rise building

70 SOCIAL HOUSING AND GARAGE IN MINA DEL MORRO, BILBAO

The site was a former iron mine - rudnik eljeza, with a topography that had slopes of up to 50
meters, surrounded by a disorganized and degraded residential outskirts to the north and by the
channeled Nervion River and the Miraflores peninsula and Miribilla to the south.

The assignment is the result of Europan IV Competition (Chema Lapuerta Francisco Burgos and
architects, as in the Coslada project, and the rest of the team are from De Lapuerta & Asensio
architects). Although we were working on the same plot of the competition, having less housing units
and acting only in an edge, it seemed that the project had to start from different premises. It was not
so and we became lucky and were able to apply, even radicalize the ideas of Europan.

Indeed, if we look at the panels awarded in the contest and read the ideas outlined, they are valid for
that, but even more for the five towers finally executed:

"END and top off the edge of town. It was the responsibility of the proposed architecture to order
against confusion. "
"CONVERT the upper street to a viewer street. The buildings will mark, surprise with different views
different from the other side "
"PROJECT houses to look to the landscape and noon, the park and the streets"
"It is about SEWING vertically, assigning that role to the own building."

The result at the premises of the place and the intentions of the project are five residential towers
(only for its slenderness) perched on a stepped base (due to the sharp slope) that absorbs all the
sector garages (four times more places than which correspond ) which is accessed by a new street
below; intermediate semipublic squares looking at the views across the Nervion; all the living
rooms facing the midday sun.

Five towers, slender drawers, black cellulose-cement as rain facades; the Naturvex graphite is
riveted on double omegas in expansion. Sockets of prefabricated concrete with black washed
aggregate : black gravel cover. Fronts to south and anodized aluminum joinery in its color.

DATA:

Architects: Jose Maria de Lapuerta and Francisco Burgos.

Team: Carlos Asensio. Associate architect / Architects: Elena de las Moras, Augustine Martin, Paloma
Campo, Irene Zuniga, Eva Calleja. / Structure: Juan Carlos Salva / Quantity Surveyor: Juan Francisco
Robles / Quantity Surveyor in construction: Luis Alberto Martinez

Promoter: Basque Government

Contruction: Ferrovial

Surface: 22,500 m2

Dates.Competition Europan IV: 1996. Project:1998 Construction:2002-2005

84 homes in the Mina del Morro

- floor area: 8.545m

- Eduardo Belz, Luis Diaz-Maurino and Juan Garcia Millan

- 2006 and 2007

The initial program needs, proposed for the Europan 4 competition, provided for the construction of
356 homes in an area of 29,500 m2, which was the primary need. This provision is complemented
residential 8,700 m2 of retail space and 16,100 m2 of tertiary use, more than 4,400 m2 of social
facilities. Naturally, we had to fix the road, parking and provide on the site of green areas and outdoor
public spaces.

The site is located on the edge of the neighborhood of Sagarminaga-a heterogeneous set of
residential buildings for classes more popular-, built in the 50s and 60s with high building density and
poor urban quality. The land had a steep slope and had previously been occupied by a mining, already
in disuse, which had pierced the ground with numerous galleries. From the first moment we were
interested in the border character of the place, no man's land between the old town and outside,
between the Nervion River and Mount between nature and the city ... The project explored the
ambiguous condition. Therefore, one of the operations that were investigated in the project was
manipulating the density to meet the different conditions that were present after making the initial
indeterminacy of the place, whose mestizo nature has always tried to keep.

To meet the needs of the next one we proposed a rather introverted neighborhood cluster, low-rise,
surrounded by a high perimeter concentrating the well-related equipment and tertiary neighborhood
stores. The existing, very dense, fluffed neighborhood by preserving for public use of two large open,
sunny spaces and distant views, and free surfaces between the towers were conceived as urban
viewpoints. In the heart of the cluster buildings rise above a carpet of green spaces, the road is solved
by an inner ring while parking lots are concentrated in the perimeter buildings.

In addition to treasuring this indeterminacy full of potential, the place could become an urban facade to
the entrance on the motorway to Bilbao. To meet the requirements of the distant propose a new image
for the area through a comb of several towers that exert visual filter the urban environment remains
behind introducing the qualities of order and repetition.

After modifying the planning as a result of winning the contest, we commissioned the construction of
one of the resulting plots, plot 4. The rest were charged to other architects and the result has obviously
been uneven.

This plot is one of two that make up the central area of the whole. It consists of six residential pieces
that are scattered on the slope with river randomness, without subordinating to parallel alignments but
controlled by a rational geometry. Developing the idea of long-staggered-broken, the layout of the
solids is leaving empty exteriors Pulsating, which are narrowed or widened, so that an intermediate
scale of common spaces appears.

The blocks have a mixed type between the volume of single-family row houses and functioning of a
social housing building with access by corridor. Each house is entered from the outside, with the
independence of the individual, but are stacked on one another, with the logic of the collective. The
orientation of the buildings necessarily imply that access galleries, which pour hallways, kitchens,
drying rooms and bathrooms, were placed on the north side of the building while on the south side,
open to the sun and views, remain bedrooms and seating areas.

The plants are organized by a succession of bands of different uses and characteristics: access
outside gallery, camera technique, crunched service parts and creaked stays. The sections are set as
a stack of layers separated by continuous habitable floors. The broken and staggered geometry of
buildings causes a displacement of the housing within the horizontal layers, so that there is vertical
continuity of the various functional bands but not housing, which slide over each other horizontally.

The construction is quite elementary. The horizontal sliding condition of housing determined that the
structure should function as a system of parallel planes, single geometric element that ensured
continuity. Hence brick load-bearing walls, which support one-way slabs of concrete beams were
used. The low height of the central blocks involved a small transmission of loads to the ground, whose
delivery would be solved with continuous shallow foundation. However, a very conservative
geotechnical study required the use of pilotage depth calculated solely on tips to prevent the layer
pierced by mining galleries. Hence the blocks, like "crawlers" have finished developing abundant and
very long legs to rest on the deep rock matrix, which is about micro piles up to 30 m deep and only 16
cm in diameter. Sometimes we like the earth was transparent ...
The graphs shown here analyze the Belzunce, Daz Maurio and Garca Milln project in Bilbao,
Spain. This proposal, winner of the competition Europan IV, involves the recovery of the lands of a
disused mine next to a very densely populated working class neighbourhood. It is part of a zoning
operation of the authors who then afterwards break up into different tasks, according to the division of
the plot. This intervention is very directly connected to the project of the adjacent plot, which is the one
that can hold the highest population density. The project is adapted to the slope and creates a block
with no access to traffic. On this block, the buildings wind over a well-cared collective space. It tries a
type of row house which also takes advantage of the difference in elevation to regulate the heights and
places emphasis on the decks which, in this case, become a fifth spectacular faade. The scarce
variety of types of homes is the least notable aspect.
a+t research group carried out an exhaustive analysis in the publication Dbook on collective
housings contribution to the dense city covering 64 projects. Based on indicators such as floor area
ratio, population density, building volumes, heights and uses, a comparative analysis giving examples
of dense living was attained. With this forthcoming series of posts we would like to show some of the
most significant examples contained in the book.