Social Housing In Ceuta / IND [Inter.National.Design]

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Text description provided by the architects. The international competition on Vanguard Social Housing (VIVA) organized by the Spanish Ministry of Housing placed a high emphasis on the relationship of the new architecture with the urban environment under the slogan 'We Make City'. Addressed to disadvantaged citizens and -as expected in most social housing projects- it had a tight budget. We decided to confront the tightness of the budget by taking advantage of the richness of the site complexity. Ceuta is in the north-western tip of the African continent and yet it is a European enclave, if you zoom in into the competition site within Ceuta you find the border of Morocco within 1km. The site in that sense at in the frontier of Europe and Africa, yet once you are in the site you don’t feel you are in a Spanish city, nor in a Moroccan, it is at best a hybrid landscape and to an extent it feels unique in this regard. Within 100 meters the site faces perhaps the biggest informal settlement of Europe called Barriada Principe Alfonso, a settlement characterized by hundreds of self built structures mostly inhabited by Arab immigrants characterized by their small scale, massiveness, cubic forms, labyrinth street patterns and intensive use of private terraces as public spaces are scarce. Once you are in the site the sounds of the call for prayer from nearby mosques makes you realize this is not your classical peripheral social housing plot. It is an intense and beautiful merging ground of cultures and environments, or perhaps to an untrained eye a rather brutal battleground between two ways of making a city. Finally the competition site also plays an unusual feature for social housing, with great views to the Mediterranean Sea. The competition asked for a clearly feasible scheme within the budget and restricted its typology to open block (slabs) as expected in most social housing schemes. Was this the right answer for this specific condition?