In idyllic Son Servera on the island of Mallorca, Barcelona firm Peris+Toral Arquitectes has created an affordable housing project that feels of a piece with its surroundings. Its two buildings feature self-supporting facades composed of ashlars (square-cut masonry units) made of marés, the sandstone and limestone specific to the Balearic Islands. Positioned in parallel, yet staggered on the plot, the dual volumes break up the form of the whole in order to render it in scale with its broader context. They also negotiate uneven terrain.
“Each adapts to the topography: Although both have three floors, the one facing the landscape appears to have one floor less due to the higher street level,” explains José Toral, who co-founded Peris+Toral with his partner, Marta Peris, in 2005. The buildings’ arrangement on the plot resulted in expansive geometries that the architects fashioned into shared (and walled) courtyards.
“Common streets” — ones as wide as the thoroughfares in the small town — knit the buildings together on all three levels. They are delineated by elegant slats that visually stretch the building vertically coupled with metal mesh barriers that enclose cuts in the floor slab between units (which help cross breezes circulate throughout the buildings and allow sunlight to penetrate down to the lower floors). Along these routes, residents step into their individual homes via wooden “lattices,” intermediate spaces that, as Toral says, “filter the relationship between the private and the shared.” The capacious portals feel as big as rooms and many people treat them as porches, pulling out a chair to hang out in them.
Inside, the layouts of the 42 units are spare and informed by passive strategies. In one version of the interior layout, you first enter the kitchen and living–dining areas; deeper inside, the bedrooms connect to an indoor terrace through glass doors. This “winter garden,” Toral explains, “captures the energy into the bedroom.” Solar heat is absorbed by the concrete floor and released into the interiors during winter; window blinds (and ceiling fans) help moderate heat in the summer. The idea is that the homes are comfortable throughout the seasons.
The materials are sustainable, with no cosmetic finishes applied to them. The concrete floors and ceilings, for instance, show off their exposed joints and formwork ribs, and the load-bearing ceramic walls are made of hollow bricks fired with biomass from local industry (and filled with sand for thermoacoustic control). Overall, the palette exudes raw character.
“In our architecture, this is a constant,” Toral explains. “We try to simplify the solutions, and the aesthetics of the building have a lot to do with the construction of the building: This makes it more economical and more ecological.” It’s also more sensitive to exigencies: Limestone and lime-plaster are not chosen just because they visually fit the context — they boast hygrothermal properties that also help regulate indoor heat and moisture in a seaside locale that experiences up to 80 per cent humidity.
Founded in the 13th century, Son Servera is a municipality of 11,000 or so residents. Today, it’s known for its tourist attractions (golf and beaches, mainly) and its singular architectural marvel: the century-old Església Nova, an unfinished Gothic church by Gaudí protégé Joan Rubió i Bellver. While not quite as long in the making, Peris+Toral’s big project on the small island also took considerable time to be completed. It won a competition in 2009; after the financial crisis and the first, world-shaking years of the COVID pandemic, it’s finally finished some 15 years later.
Peris+Toral has sought out competitions from its beginnings because they afford the firm opportunities to try new ideas and push the envelope in an area — affordable housing — that often feels prescribed. “We always had the goal to do public housing,” Toral explains. “And the best way we found to propose new ways of living was through competitions. Because the private market doesn’t want to take any risk.” Central to the firm’s work is the idea of activating the home, of making it dynamic for the people living in it and in its relation to the community.
The innovation of building systems — and collaborating with local trades to expand the possibilities of construction techniques like rammed earth, precast concrete and mass timber — also figures greatly in its approach. Every project is different, but the intention remains the same: to choose the most ecologically viable mode of building for the context at hand. And while the practice exploits the possibilities of photovoltaics — all of its housing projects feature solar panels — it maximizes passive energy for both environmental and economic purposes.
“In our social housing, we can often fight energy poverty,” Toral says. “You know, the people that live in our buildings cannot afford to pay the rising costs of energy.” He references world events, like the onset of the war in Ukraine, that make energy prices unstable for all of Europe. “In our building, however, this was not an issue. Our strategy has a lot to do with not needing energy, rather than being very efficient — because efficiency is not the solution. There is this rebound effect: Every time we are more efficient, instead of using less energy, we consume more.”
Exemplifying two decades of expertise in crafting sustainable social housing, Peris+Toral’s project in Son Servera is both humble and remarkable. Like the firm’s other works, it is deferential to and deeply embedded in its place: The textures and proportions are drawn specifically from the local context, and the project is designed with the unique climate of the island in mind. And it’s remarkable for all the reasons that make the studio’s portfolio stand out on the global stage: It boasts a compelling form, it’s crafted with time-honoured materials chosen for their durability and sustainability, and it invites tenants to experiment with their domestic setting.
Here, residents can improvise how to share their public spaces; conviviality is built into the combined ideas of the common street and the lattice, that warm wood entrance that forms a portal between interior and exterior. “The strategy of sharing,” Toral says, “is very important to us.” As Peris and Toral have returned to the project time and again, they’ve seen kids playing in the shared courtyards and walkways and people enjoying their entrance portals in different ways. One tenant has put a library in his, filling it with books that the community can share. In these ways and more, Toral says, “you can understand that the whole building belongs to you.”
With common streets, winter
gardens and entry lattices, the
latest social housing project
by Spanish firm Peris+Toral
posits new scenarios for living