84 public housing units in Mina del Morro

The site is located on the edge of the Sagarminaga neighbourhood -a heterogeneous group of housing buildings for the lower classes-, built in the fifties and sixties with a high building density and poor urban quality. The terrain was steeply sloping and had previously been occupied by a now disused mining operation, which had dug numerous galleries into the subsoil.

From the very first moment we were interested in the frontier character of the place, a no-man's land between the old town and the outskirts, between the river Nervión and the mountain, between nature and the city...

The project explored this ambiguous condition. Therefore, one of the operations investigated in the project was the manipulation of density to attend to the different conditions that were becoming present after the initial indeterminacy of the site, whose mixed-race nature has always been preserved.

To meet the needs of the immediate vicinity, we proposed a fairly introverted, low-rise neighbourhood cluster, surrounded by a higher perimeter that concentrated tertiary commercial and amenity space, well connected to the neighbourhood. The existing, very dense neighbourhood was sponge-formed by preserving for public use two large, sunny, open spaces with distant views, and the open areas between the towers were conceived as urban viewpoints. In the heart of the cluster, the buildings are built on a carpet of green spaces, the roads are laid out in an inner ring, while the car parks are concentrated in the perimeter buildings.