Caledonian Somosaguas

Density or looseness? Intensity or laid-backness? Public or private? Urban or suburban? The problem in creating new housing on the edge of the city is to somehow synthesie all of these seeming opposites - not to choose between them but to lift a little from them all to create a new cocktail of the familiar and the foreign, every day and the exotic. The intention was to create a kind of habitat, a new neighborhood in which the houses are loosely arranged around a web of public spaces - streets, plazas, a pool - and in which the communal streetscape occupies as much area as the dwellings themselves. It is a design for a public kind of living - a nod to the Spanish proclivity for living in the city and occupying the spaces of urbanity arguably more than they do their own homes (which remain as places for sleeping and siestas). The houses themselves blend typologies in the same way as does the development itself. There is a deliberate but delicate touch of the pueblo about their arrangement - the white walls and the cubic blocks. There is a little of the Bauhaus Siedlung - the model village established as an experiment in contemporary living and construction - the restrained, minimal palette and aesthetic and the functions a trailer for how a modernist life might look. In the complexity of its composition, the layering of the landscape and the weaving of a web of public outdoor space, an architecture emerges. The houses are elongated - attenuated so that their walls begin to define emergent streets rather than the staccato landscape of individual cubes. Yet a series of interventions, repeating motifs and urban and landscape devices appears to stop the spaces between the houses becoming alleys and to break down too much regularity. Kinks, setbacks, steps, terraces and greenery create a variety of sub-urban spaces and a coherent internal language which could in theory, be expanded and replicated, which is exactly what the architects intended, creating the development as a kind of prototype for a roll-out programme, a model which becomes more efficient and more practical as experience of building and dwelling grows. Equally important is the separation of traffic from pedestrians. Each house has access to its parking space internally, individually plugged into the parking layer which is otherwise invisible. It is a system that has the advantages of a private garage but without disfiguring the house fronts or clogging up street level with vast expanses of garage doors, driveways and traffic. The individual houses appear quite modest in dimension, with a width of only 5.5m (each is the same width although lengths vary). Yet inside they reveal a surprising complexity of interlocking spaces and configurations of solid and void, wall and opening. The ground floors are transparent - accommodating the public functions of life and entirely glazed walls open into courtyards which mirror the interior spaces so that the broad area appears to flow into the outdoor space seamlessly In the larger versions that more public space is also extended upwards via a void which expands the surface area of the window which appears here as a double-height opening and which will eventually allow the canopy of the trees to impinge on the interior just as the floor appears to steal space from outside. The play of transparency and solidity between the ground and first floors becomes, in a way, the architectural language which determines the whole neighborhood, a juggling of solid block and delicate, attenuated layer, indoor and outdoor room. There is no cacophony of balconies and protrusions as all terraces are subsumed within the overall volumes of the structure. There is nothing extraneous. The minimal nature of those architectural means produces a uniquely restrained sense of place and urban landscape in which all the elements have something to do, all are defined by their function rather than their style. The simplicity of the language and its internal coherence is also a device intended to build a basic vocabulary which is flexible enough to accommodate differing needs, a modular construction based on a 1.25m grid allowing multiple variations within the same architectural language. The four basic types here are not the super-luxury dimensions of villas but, ranging between 94-230 sqm, they cover the requirements for family dwellings. The houses are planned in such a way that they can be packed onto the site with surprising density. Madrid is a dense and intense city with a population of approximately 80 people per hectare. At Somosaguas, a neighbourhood which feels loose, laid-back and very green, the demographic density is a surprising 114 people per hectare. And at the centre of all this is the water. The space in which you might expect to find an urban centre, the plaza defined by church and town hall, gives itself instead to the communal pleasures of the pool. It is, in a way, a denial of the solid core, a relinquishing of the urban heart of the Mediterranean settlement in favour of something less substantial. But it does place a certain communal activity at the heart of the scheme, a sense that each house feeds into something larger than itself rather than trying to create its own fenced-off and self-contained utopia. The streets and spaces here flow so fluidly that to separate them from their surroundings seems harsh and counter to the spirit of the plan. The problem with these edge-city developments is that they easily become defensive, over-private and, in shutting themselves off, they relinquish the capacity to develop into genuinely public places. Perhaps as the neighbourhood develops and expands the streets created here will begin to weave and insinuate themselves into the emerging surrounding fabric like the tendrils of a creeping plant. But as a seed, a mechanism to catalyze a communal and generous-spirited life, it is a fascinating and elegant prospect.