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Ivet Gonzalez

Case study — Housing

Torre Vermella

Poblenou, Barcelona · 2022

The tower against a summer sky — load-bearing brick in the red of Poblenou's industrial chimneys.

The tower against a summer sky — load-bearing brick in the red of Poblenou's industrial chimneys.

Location
Poblenou, Barcelona
Year
2022
Type
Housing
Status
Completed
Area
9,600 m²
Role
Design architect, competition to completion
Client
IMHAB — Institut Municipal de l'Habitatge
Photography
Placeholder imagery

Social housing towers usually apologise for their height. Torre Vermella does not. The competition brief asked for density on a tight corner site; the answer is a slender, load-bearing brick tower — red like the district's industrial chimneys — that treats housing as civic architecture.

The plan places four dwellings per floor, each occupying a full corner. There are no internal corridors longer than nine metres, no dwelling with a single orientation. Every apartment gets cross-ventilation, a deep terrace, and a view either to the sea or to Collserola.

Looking up the south face from the corner of the block. The brick leaves are structural, not cladding.
Looking up the south face from the corner of the block. The brick leaves are structural, not cladding.
Density is not a burden to be disguised. Done well, it is simply company.
The east facade at evening. Each lit opening is a different household; the pattern never repeats.
The east facade at evening. Each lit opening is a different household; the pattern never repeats.
The street pavilion at the tower's foot — nursery below, bicycle hall behind, the white roof plane marking the public entrance.
The street pavilion at the tower's foot — nursery below, bicycle hall behind, the white roof plane marking the public entrance.

The structure is honest to a fault: load-bearing brick outer leaves, concrete cores, and exposed ceilings that give tenants an extra thirty centimetres of air. The material palette was chosen for how it ages — brick, terrazzo, galvanised steel — on a municipal maintenance budget.

At street level the tower steps down to a dark-brick pavilion holding a nursery and a bicycle hall, stitching the block back into the neighbourhood. The building was fully allocated within a month of completion.

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The ribbed terracotta shell rising against the afternoon sky — structural clay, fired forty minutes from the site.