Peris+Toral Arquitectes design social housing in Mallorca, combining environmental and social strategies for sustainability

Architects Marta Peris and José Toral have been rethinking social housing standards and proposing new ways of living for 20 years. In this particular project, they strike a balance between privacy and coexistence.

The typology of the house does not distinguish between the day and night areas. The living-dining-kitchen area connects the rooms and looks out through a terrace that functions as a winter garden, and through a wooden lattice gate that separates the entrance from the walkways leading to the dwellings. The walkways act as high-rise village streets, thus promoting social interaction and a sense of community among the inhabitants.

Located in the northeast of the island of Mallorca, in Son Servera, this social housing project takes as a reference the local atmosphere, which is characterised by the presence of marés facades and walls that delimit gardens, as well as sloping roofs of Arabic tiles. These elements have been decisive in the selection of materials and in the design of the building.

The location of the plot on the edge of the village, its proximity to the historic centre and the small scale of the neighbouring plots suggest a strategy of fragmentation. The building is articulated in two volumes aligned to the perimeter streets, arranged in a staggered manner to adapt to the slope of the land. This layout not only reduces the visual impact on the old town, but also creates two courtyards on opposite corners delimited by a perimeter wall, which act as intermediate spaces and accompany the building’s entrances.

One of them is mineral in character and functions as a plaza, a social meeting place reinforced by the adjoining community rooms. The other is covered with vegetation and acts as a garden, providing environmental and visual benefit, as well as being a habitat for biodiversity and allowing water infiltration into the ground, as well as conserving a pre-existing well on the site.

The floor plan consists of six and eight dwellings in each piece respectively, arranged around a walkway. This walkway is separated from the façades in the central section, generating a distance of privacy and openings through which light and air flow, thus guaranteeing cross ventilation of the dwellings.

On the other hand, the rest of the typologies are pass-through and have double orientation and views. The structure shapes the space by means of load-bearing walls that are folded in the form of a fretwork to create locking walls. This arrangement allows for the diagonal articulation of the interior space of the dwellings.

The typology does not distinguish between day and night areas, separating the rooms, each one at an opposite end of the floor plan and connecting them by means of a through room that looks outwards through two intermediate spaces: a capturing terrace, like a winter garden that allows a building without active systems, and a wooden lattice gate to achieve privacy at the entrance. Instead of opaque doors that separate and isolate, the boxes connect the house with the intermediate spaces, protecting the privacy of its inhabitants by means of wooden lattices.

The joinery system allows the enclosure to open wide and create an outdoor room where the change of paving indicates the private boundary. The aim is to strike a balance between privacy and conviviality.

The walkways leading to the houses act as high-rise streets promoting social interaction and community among the inhabitants.

The location of the two communication cores in the building generates loops of double circulations, which are amplified by the presence of additional staircases at the ends of the walkways taking advantage of the ribbed structure. This encourages a wide range of possible routes that converge in the courtyards.

The load-bearing walls have been built with ceramic pieces fired with biomass from the local industry, hollow bricks type H20. As the apparent density of this material is low, it was decided to place the bricks with the hollows vertically in order to fill them with sand and thus increase their mass and inertia. This solution makes it possible to resolve the acoustics between neighbours with a single sheet. To seal the joints well and give the wall hygrothermal performance, it has been covered on both sides with a render of sprayed lime mortar with a minimum thickness of 15 mm.

The white concrete floor slabs are lightened by showing the in-situ ribs of one-way logic. The formwork has been reused as a base for the pitched roof structure. The walkways are made with a 10 cm thick cork SATE covered with lime plaster.

The façade is made of self-supporting marés stone, 10 cm thick, 20 cm thick for the openings and lintelled arches and 40 cm thick for the walls. Two types of stone are used, one harder, heavier and more resistant, white in the areas in contact with the ground and a less dense one in the upper parts.

Local sandstone is used, both in ashlars and in its amorphous version, lime, as both materials come from the same source, the marés. Lime is used in the form of powder or paste and is used in mortars and plasters, providing great benefits for comfort, such as hygroscopicity, insulating capacity and surface protection, as well as antibacterial and fungicidal properties that are beneficial to the healthiness of the interior environment.

Project: Living in Limestone. 42 Viviendas sociales.
Architecture: Peris+Toral Arquitectes. Marta Peris y José Manuel Toral.
Location: Son Severa (Mallorca).
Finished: 2023.
Surface: 6.018 m2.
Promoter: IBAVI. Institut Balear de l’Habitatge.
Team:  Guillem Pascual, Izaskun González, Ana Espinosa, Maria Megías, Cristina Porta, Miguel Bernat, Maria Ubach, Albert Rubio, Cecilia Rodríguez, Elisabet Aguilar, Álvaro Homar.
Structures: Bernúz Fernández Arquitectes. 
Installations and Telecommunications: L3J Tècnics Associats.
Energy and environmental study: Societat Orgànica.
Technical Architects: Joan Brunet, Marco Menéndez.
Photography: José Hevia.
Text: Peris+Toral Arquitectes.

Peris+Toral Arquitectes

Peris+Toral Arquitectes, from its Barcelona office, focuses on exploring new ways of living and building to address the challenges posed by climate and housing emergencies, under a line of thought that places the individual at the centre of the action and the architect as a social agent.

Marta Peris and José Toral suggest scenarios in which the user takes over the role of inhabiting and aspire to rethink the standards of the programme in order to respond to the forms of inhabiting that society requires at any given moment.

Marta Peris holds a PhD in architecture and is a lecturer at the ETSAB. She presented her doctoral thesis in 2016, entitled La casa japonesa a través del cine de Yasujiro Ozu, published in 2019 under the name La casa de Ozu. José Toral is an associate professor in the Department of Architectural Projects at the ETSAB UPC, specialising in the study of public space and urban projects.

His work has been recognised with the Spanish Architecture Award CSCAE 2022, and finalists for the EU Mies Award 2022 and 2024, his works have been exhibited at the Cité de l’Architecture de Paris 2022, Best architecture exhibition Spain-Korea Seoul 2021, at the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2016, at the UIA Tokyo 2011, among others. Both his works and his writings have been widely published in national and international magazines and media.

Project by Peris+Toral Arquitectes