Marta Peris and José Toral: Shared facilities and the challenge of single person households

In this new interview from the Neighbourhood series, created by Girbau LAB, we speak with Marta Peris and José Toral, founders of PERIS+TORAL ARQUITECTES. Their work in public housing questions traditional models through the design of non-hierarchical rooms, the elimination of corridors and the use of timber as a structural material. We discuss how spatial layouts can foster neighbourly life, the social and climatic role of circulation spaces and atria, and the potential of shared laundry facilities in everyday life.

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In your social housing projects, such as the one in Cornellà, you have always placed a lot of emphasis on replacing the traditional model with corridors and rooms in the matrix of interconnected rooms, and you talk a lot in other interviews that your architecture tries to condition social roles and care work and other tasks. What is the role that non-hierarchical housing can have in helping to distribute these more visible tasks of domestic work?

For us, non-hierarchical housing, with equally sized rooms, starts from the idea that all rooms can have equal value. If we take this approach to its most radical conclusion, all spaces would be open and all would be served spaces. The laundry area, which has traditionally occupied an enclosed, hidden place, could also be opened up and made visible.

In Cornellà, for example, there is a cupboard that opens onto the entrance to the bathroom, very close to the kitchen. Behind this decision is a desire to make visible spaces that have historically been regarded as service areas and kept out of sight. We want to rethink their character and their presence within the home. Connections between rooms create fluidity and help make this reproductive labour more visible.

We work mainly in public housing, where programmes have evolved considerably. We are now trying to take this a step further by moving some of these activities out of the dwelling and into communal areas.

In your practice you work to question or put into crisis the organization of the program and the spatial organization. Specifically, I am interested in understanding, in general, how you think you are exploring the location of common spaces or inter-building common services (not only the laundry, but also the community kitchen or other common services). What are the main reflections you have behind it?

Our approach seeks to avoid classical functionalism: rather than assigning a fixed function to each room, we want it to accommodate more than one use. Above all, we are interested in the idea that the home does not end at the boundary of private space. Communal areas can also form part of it, even if they have a different character. Between the private, the shared, the communal and the common, there are a series of gradients that we need to define more clearly.

Extending the home into these spaces allows us to optimize resources. Consider household appliances, for example, which are duplicated in every dwelling and raise issues of obsolescence. Sharing them makes it possible to invest in more reliable, efficient machines and to incorporate water reuse systems.

We have tested two complementary strategies. The first places communal spaces at the building’s extremities, on the roof or on the ground floor, to generate movement and encourage encounters. The second intersperses them alongside circulation areas, in contact with everyday routes through the building.

We can place a laundry at the top of the atrium, close to the roof, or on the ground floor if we want to open it up to the neighbourhood. In the latter case, we begin to think beyond the building, in terms of a ‘care block’ at the scale of the urban block. What particularly interests us about these decisions is the human relationships they can foster.

It’s very interesting what you’re saying. Beyond functional criteria, is it simply that the project is telling you because of how it’s located, the light, etc., or are you really finding patterns about which options work best?

One of our main lines of research in the practice is how to make shared spaces work and bring people together. Laundry facilities have great potential because they respond to a domestic need and involve waiting time. In other communal spaces, you make a deliberate choice to go and share; you go to the laundry to wash your clothes. If there is a table, some books or a place to look after children, that time offers an opportunity to interact. We have seen book exchanges and conversations between neighbours emerge.

In a building we will construct in Montgat, with 17 dwellings per floor, we have provided a laundry space on each floor. By contrast, in GREENH@USE, the laundry is on the top floor, in relation to the atrium roof. We test different arrangements according to the opportunities each building offers and the constraints of the planning framework.

Cultural and generational factors also have a strong influence. When we completed Glòries in 2017, we saw that some residents felt certain activities should remain inside the home out of a sense of modesty. In other cases, we find a greater openness to sharing. It is interesting to observe how these attitudes change and how projects respond both to social transformations and to our design strategies.

You have touched on two or three topics that seem very interesting and key to me and that I would like to delve into. One is the temporal issue and the other is the dimension of water and resources. Laundry is an activity that encompasses different spaces and times (from home, when you accumulate clothes, to the hallways, the washing area or the drying area). To what extent can the temporal dimension affect when defining the space or how you understand the distribution of the program?

For us, these activities activate shared life. In a society where loneliness and isolation are increasing, it is important for buildings to offer opportunities for chance encounters.

In Montgat, distributing a small communal laundry on each floor shortens the routes and the time needed to do the washing. It also makes domestic work more visible: children and adults will encounter it in their daily lives and can become more aware of the time and effort it requires.

Taking laundry out of the private sphere introduces a certain slowing down into everyday life. It is no longer a matter of running the washing machine at midnight while trying not to disturb anyone; it requires organization and greater awareness of the activity, almost like a ritual. Sharing also provides access to better-quality infrastructure, which helps care for clothes and encourages the exchange of knowledge and conversations between neighbours. Above all, we want sharing to open up possibilities, rather than merely being about managing conflicts or problems.

And if we extend the question of water, one of the great contributions at the project level that you explore is the role of the atrium and these central courtyards, not only in the social dimension, but also in the climatic one. One of the lines that are being explored at Girbau LAB is regenerative (reduction of microplastics, rejection of grey water…). What is your approach to considering architecture from this perspective of reusing resources such as water in closed cycles?

When we began working on the bioclimatic performance of buildings, we realised that many decisions had more to do with the performance of materials than with aesthetics. If we choose timber, it is for its ability to absorb odours and regulate humidity; if we choose concrete, it is for its thermal inertia. The problem is not using concrete, but hiding it behind a suspended ceiling without taking advantage of that inertia.

In this respect, laundry facilities offer several possibilities. The first concerns water. We design greywater and rainwater reuse systems linked to vegetation, seeking to make the use and reuse of the resource contribute to the operation of these systems.

There is also the energy dimension. Drying clothes can be linked to the performance of the atrium: its capacity to capture heat or promote cooling can be used both for drying and for adjacent gathering spaces. Placing laundries on the roof also activates these areas and gives them an everyday use.

We have, however, encountered a technical and social challenge. In public housing buildings where people with different consumption and cooking habits live together, we have had to adjust greywater treatment systems using microorganisms to prevent odours and ensure the water can be reused in toilet cisterns.

Looking to the future and within the framework of Barcelona’s World Capital of Architecture, what do you think is the paradigm shift in social housing design that should be consolidated by 2050?

For us, the biggest paradigm shift is the growth in single-person households. This is the demographic figure we need to keep in mind: single-person households already account for 30% of households in Catalonia, and the expectation is 40-50% by around 2050. Beyond loneliness, this creates a significant resource problem: kitchens, bathrooms and basic facilities are multiplied for each person. In Germany, housing floor area currently stands at almost 55 m² per person, whereas in the 1920s we were talking about 20 or 30 m². We are very efficient per square metre, but very inefficient per person. We need to take this factor into account.

That is why we need to make a clear commitment to shared spaces and recover social skills that have become a little rusty. We are currently building a cooperative for older people organised in clusters: each person has their own private space and shares other spaces within a living unit.

The risk is that these advances end up being used to undermine housing conditions, as can happen with speculative coliving. There are important differences between the various forms of cohousing, collaborative housing and coliving. We do not want to reduce private floor area at the expense of quality of life. That is why an up-to-date regulatory framework and accommodation decree are essential, so that the contribution of communal spaces can be taken into account without compromising housing quality.

Finally, what would be the main ingredient of a “good neighbour” for you and what is the work that you can do from architecture to promote it?

We believe it begins with understanding the different gradients of privacy and moving beyond the public-private dichotomy. We need to bring private, shared, communal and common space, as well as the space of the urban block, into our vocabulary.

Distinguishing between these realms, beyond ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, will help us foster other kinds of relationships. We are interested in a reading of the word ‘private’ as taking away or setting apart from the common. That interpretation suggests something beautiful: that the common came first. In the face of the individualism we have learned, it invites us to rethink the relationship between what is our own and what is common.

We are delighted to have come and to have spent this time at the Neighbourhood.