The development received the Ciutat de Palma Guillem Sagrera architecture award 2022
The president of the Government of the Balearic Islands, Francina Armengol, and the councillor for Mobility and Housing, Josep Marí, handed over the keys to the eight subsidised housing units (HPP) located in Salvador Espriu street and built by the IBAVI this morning.
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It is a building of eight homes that began to be built last October 2019 on a plot of land ceded by the Palma City Council. Seven of the eight homes have two bedrooms and one has only one bedroom, and are between 50 and 70 square metres in size. As of today, families over the age of 65 and single-parent families will be able to move in, with a personalised rent adjustment that in no case exceeds 30% of their income.
Armengol has defended that “housing has to be a right of people to be able to live in dignity, to be able to plan your life. This is how we have understood it since 2015 and this is how we have worked”. The president also thanked Palma City Council for the transfer of the site and for the “courage and bravery to be able to move forward” with projects such as the one being handed over today, which is “a source of pride for all of us” both from an architectural and social point of view: “When we build, we think about who has to live and about the local economy”.
Armengol recalled that, despite the uncertainty of the European context and after the difficult times experienced with the pandemic, “we are fighting to make it possible to guarantee this right of citizens, we are demonstrating that what we say are not words, but deeds, that since we have been in government we have prioritised this public policy and that is why today we can hand over these keys”.
The development, which has involved an investment of one million euros, was recently awarded the Ciutat de Palma Guillem Sagrera prize for architecture 2022. It is a development in which the construction system is sustainable architecture and which will greatly reduce the energy consumption of the families. The main materials used, such as sandstone, dried posidonia and recycled wood, are zero kilometre, which considerably reduces their environmental impact.
There are currently 612 public housing units under construction in the Balearic Islands, 192 of which are in Palma, spread over six developments. And 464 HPP are expected to be delivered this year. Thus, the public housing stock is expected to increase by 64% before the end of the legislature, and to incorporate more than 1,100 new homes, 985 of which will be new construction and the others acquired through other means such as pre-emptive rights.
Characteristics of the development
The built surface area is 662.34 m² on a plot of land ceded by Palma City Council. There are eight dwellings, one of which is adapted, of between 50.48 m² and 77.7 m² usable area. The project is designed to guarantee comfort by means of inertia (weight) as the main cooling measure in summer. This mechanism complements the cross ventilation through the use of sea breezes.
In addition, a barrel vault structure has been used on the ground floor ceiling for passive cooling in summer and this, together with the materials used, allows for high energy efficiency and a reduced ecological footprint, as the seawater used is from the municipality of Palma and the posidonia was extracted from Cala Gamba, just a few kilometres from the building.
The Mayor of Palma, José Hila, and the manager of the IBAVI, Cristina Ballester, also took part in the ceremony.