INFRASTRUCTURE OF COMMONS
Competition | Europan 18
Shortlisted

Site: La Verneda, Barcelona (ES)
Project: 2025
Team: Kevin Santus, Arianna Scaioli, Guillermo Sánchez Cárdenas, Tommaso Perasso

The housing question lies at the core of architectural practice. From modernist experiments on decent housing, social housing, and the Existenzminimum, architecture has historically framed dwelling as a collective right and as a space of social aggregation. Today, this debate reopens under new conditions, shaped by climate crisis, social and gender inequalities, material scarcity, and the need to rethink the relationship between new housing and existing contexts.
Within this horizon, the project proposes alternative forms of dwelling based on a principle of inhabiting rooted in care, equality, and the empowerment of marginalized communities. Conceived as a housing shelter, it critically explores the relationship between individual units, shared spaces, and the city, addressing the tension between “a room of one’s own” and “a room for the city”. This tension reconfigures the modern dualism between public and private through spatial sequences, atmospheric gradients, and collective infrastructures of care.
The project is developed as an open and incremental infrastructure. A modular timber construction system allows for flexibility, adaptability, and non-hierarchical living arrangements, moving beyond the nuclear family model. Sixty housing units are combined with shared services and care-oriented spaces distributed across the building, while the ground floor hosts public and semi-public functions supporting micro-economies and community life. Reuse plays a central role, both as a material strategy and as a practice of environmental and social care.
Before construction, phases of site reactivation, community engagement, and small-scale prototyping establish new rituals of inhabitation and collective ownership. After completion, the modular system enables future adaptations of units, facades, and uses over time. Shaped as a reinterpretation of the courtyard block, the project defines a compact yet open form that preserves space for a neighborhood garden, framing housing as an expandable infrastructure for coexistence and contemporary urban domesticity.