1968
In the same way that the field of architecture works on designs conceived in space, there is also the aim of achieving in the field of urbanism a type of design which enables work to be done at a greater scale and which allows the possibilities of controlling urbanism to be extended by designing a project, still working on a territory, by starting from a plan. This work seeks to be a summary of the studies carried out during a period of five years by the Taller de Arquitectura which looked at this question and participated in the issue, while showing a degree of partiality which entails in-depth work carried out by a small team.
Faced with the limitations of traditional urban design, the question was raised of the need for a new way of presenting alternatives by means of a certain type of methodological work, in which creation was passed to another level where it was outlined as the intuition of the structure.
At the start of the work, and before studying the problems on a large scale, the choice was considered of a cell-type which enabled industrialisation and made possible any type of design in its interior. The cube was chosen as a cell-type because it can be produced industrially and in series, it is replicable, it permits any design and it is identified with a habitable unit. This choice would, at a later date, enable work on a larger scale with a representative element of the three orthogonal axes which have been the geometrical support of traditional architecture.
One of the first jobs in this sense was the project design and construction of El Sargazo, a set of apartments built in 1962 in Castelldefels. The cell-type chosen was the cube, but the way it was employed was still simple and rudimentary, without its use managing to achieve more than a small part of the possibilities involved. The analysis of this job demonstrated, together with the achievements of greater independence between the different units and the possibility of a range of relationships between them, the following principal deficiencies: The grouping of cube cells in the model used was only valid for projects for small habitable concentrations and the cost was high, both because of the reduced used of industrially-made components and because of the partial use of the spaces offered, in the inside and the outside of the six faces of the cube.
For greater concentrations which demanded serial construction and the use of the greatest possible number of industrial components, the need for a study of its interior mechanics and the possibilities entailed by the decomposition of the cube in order, in this way, to be able to establish a grouping which would permit the organization of a more complex life: a project which could carry out any twinning between the cube cells to achieve all forms of groupings.
