La Corba

La Corba is a right-of-use housing cooperative promoted by its future residents, with technical support from La Dinamo Foundation. Lacol is responsible for the building design, site supervision and project management. Alongside the design process, a participatory process enables the residents to take part in decision-making regarding both the spatial organisation and the building’s construction and energy strategies, reinforcing their role as the driving force behind a self-developed cooperative housing project.

The building is located in the southern part of Sant Celoni, on a long, narrow plot. The proposal aligns the building with Ferrocarril Street, creating a distinctly urban frontage while deliberately leaving part of the buildable depth unoccupied. The rectangular plot, with a chamfered corner, is accessed from Ausiàs March Street to the south. The project comprises 15 dwellings, surface parking and a shared space on the ground floor that supports community life, encourages everyday interaction and strengthens relationships with the surrounding neighbourhood. Local planning regulations require parking provision, leading to a compact building volume that frees up part of the interior of the plot. This area accommodates surface parking designed as a planted, permeable landscape that can also be used by the residents as a communal garden. By avoiding an underground car park, the project reduces both environmental impact and construction costs.

The proposal conceives the building as a single pitched-roof volume organised around a structural system of load-bearing compressed earth blocks (CEB), creating a sequence of dual-aspect dwellings within a structural bay of 3.4 metres. The building draws on the traditional narrow terraced houses found in the historic centres of the region, an idea reinforced by the slender, through-apartment typology. Twenty-centimetre-thick CEB walls simultaneously provide the building’s structure and the required acoustic separation between dwellings, while contributing thermal mass and hygrothermal regulation without the need for additional finishes.

The ground floor accommodates the parking area, building services, a multi-purpose communal room and six dwellings. Five of these are identical one-bedroom units (39 m²) arranged within a single structural bay. The corner dwelling occupies two bays and contains two bedrooms (69 m²). The first floor contains nine dwellings (57 m²), accessed via an external gallery. These homes are organised over two levels and each includes a generous attic space beneath the pitched roof. The dwelling layouts are organised through different degrees of privacy and structured into three zones: from the kitchen, conceived as the entrance space and the main connection to the courtyard, to the more private living areas, with the bathroom located in the central strip.

The dwellings are conceived through a systematised approach, using rooms of similar dimensions that incorporate universal accessibility criteria. The design responds to a diversity of physical abilities, mobility needs and life situations, while understanding housing cooperatives as spaces for intergenerational living.

From an environmental perspective, all dwellings have east–west orientation, ensuring solar gain and cross ventilation throughout. The project aims for high environmental performance by reducing the impact of both the construction process and the building’s life cycle. Key construction decisions—such as avoiding underground parking and using compressed earth walls—contribute to a more resource-efficient building process. The high thermal mass of the earth walls makes it possible to design the building without active cooling systems, although provision is made for future installation if required.