Satellite Rooms: Francesc Mitjans’ Modern Housing Resilience in Barcelona

Barcelona has a large number of apartment buildings built throughout the twentieth century, whose sizes exceed the current needs and possibilities of its inhabitants. The new variants in lifestyles, combined with housing high prices, require other sizes and forms of organization. The transformation of existing typologies to respond to current demand would facilitate intelligent reuse of the Modern housing heritage of the city. In the Modern Movement there were formulated, typological proposals of housing with satellite segregated rooms that made possible the adaptation to the variable needs that covered social requirements beyond the traditional family nucleus, incorporating spaces to rent, to welcome a relative or set up an office. This paper proposes rescuing design project strategies, based on these lessons that architectural modernity offered on minimal housing—with shared spaces and equipped independent rooms—and applies them to built-in housing stock by Catalan architect Francesc Mitjans in Barcelona. The objective is to establish criteria for channeling the adaptation of these buildings for their reuse, preserving the organizational, spatial and material values of their architecture, and ensure that the existing typologies do not fall into obsolescence, are not transformed and segregated without criteria and speculatively, as it is beginning to happen in Barcelona, and that residential use is not expelled from the city centre.
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (published version)