The bases of this new residential building are a matrix of communicating rooms that eliminates corridors to guarantee optimum use of the floor plan and the use of timber to enable the industrialization of elements, improved quality of construction and a major reduction of deadlines and C02 emissions.

The building is organized around a courtyard that articulates a sequence of intermediate spaces. On the ground floor, a porch opens up to the city, anticipating the doorway of the building and filtering the relationship between public space and the courtyard that acts as a small plaza for the community. Instead of entering directly and independently from the outer façade to each lobby of the building, the four vertical communication shafts are situated at the four corners of the courtyard so that all the occupants converge and meet in the plaza, which represents a safe space from a gender perspective. On the model floor, entry to the apartments is from the communication shaft and the private terraces that make up the ring of outdoor spaces that overlook the courtyard.

The building’s general floor plan is a matrix of communicating rooms where a hypnotic geometric square pattern makes no distinction between aggregation and dwelling units but rather values the room as a spatial and project unit.

One of the main references for our reflections on inhabiting is the Japanese room. The tatami mat, approximately 90x180cm -twice as long as it is wide- was used in Japanese tradition to establish the measure of a room and has endured as a cultural influence beyond Japan’s borders. Nonetheless, there is one condition for a room to favour the ambiguity of uses: it must have a minimum floor area of eight tatamis, or roughly 13m2 (i.e. 3.6m x 3.6m). Apart from the Japanese eight-tatami room, there are other references with similar floor areas such as one of the versions of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen or Le Corbusier’s Petit Cabanon; from a highly specialized room to a thinking room.

Here in Cornellà the module for a room of indeterminate use is settled on a similar 366 x 366 cm. There are 114 spaces per floor and 543 in the building, all of similar dimensions. The server spaces are laid out in the central ring, while the rest of the rooms, of undifferentiated use and size (13 m2), in the facade, accommodate different forms of occupation. The inclusive open-plan kitchen is located in the central room, acting as an element of distribution that replaces the corridors, at the same time making domestic work visible and avoiding gender roles.

The apparent rigid determined network of the Cornellà rooms provides the experience of an indeterminate shifting space aligned to the degree of porosity chosen by the inhabitant. The size of the clearance between spaces conditions how the room is furnished and leads both to the requirement for a large floor area, striking a balance between porosity and the freedom to appropriate space, and to the importance of the corners of the rooms which help anchor the furniture and objects around which inhabiting revolves. Another terrace in the outer ring completes the spatial sequence: a row of spaces interconnected by large openings, permeable to fresh air, the gaze and movement.