Regenerating the tilting housing sector after the collapse

O ne million empty homes, and 300,000 families evicted from theirs. Something is out of kilter in the Spanish housing market. The collapse of the property boom took with it the Housing Ministry and benefited the banks, while leaving a great many people wondering if they did the right thing when they signed that mortgage agreement.

Aside from the question as to why Spaniards are so obsessed with owning their own homes, rather than renting, the crisis has also revealed the responsibility of the country's top architects in designing so much poor-quality housing. As a result, a new generation of young architects might finally get its chance.

If one thing has been made clear by the property crisis it's that big names don't necessarily produce the best blueprints for living. The last couple of years have seen a shift away from grandiose projects, with younger architects winning prestigious prizes such as the Ritzier for affordable homes. In short, it's what's on the inside that counts, not the façade. So how come the big names are still uninterested in designing affordable, quality housing. After all, isn't that what Spain needs right now?

Spain's housing policy has come under attack from both the EU and the UN, which in recent years have highlighted the fact that local councils have been dependent on revenue from granting building licenses and other real estate deals for their income.

For example, a 2009 UN report states that 26.5 percent of the income to local town halls has come from the construction industry. Marbella and Mallorca have both been heavily criticized.

"Uncontrolled speculation has taken place over the last 20 years and this, with the large number of empty properties, means that Spain is at the bottom of the European list for access to housing," says the report.

The report states that the people most likely to suffer the consequences of this are women, pensioners, youngsters, disabled people, immigrants and the homeless.

The UN warns that the current situation is not sustainable in the long term and says that successive governments' housing policies have failed to slow down the increase in house prices.

It also highlights a shortfall in the incomes of the local councils since the construction industry began to grind to halt, and questions how this shortfall can be rectified.

"We need to look into how to build better low-cost housing, but that requires time: time to get to know the area the property will be built in; the materials to be used, the building systems, the customers, and the way that they live," says Jaume Coll, co-winner with Judith Leclerc of this year's Catalonia National Housing Prize. It would seem that the big names in the architecture business are in a hurry; of the most recent Pritzker Prize winners, only Portugal's Álvaro Siza has taken an interest in building low-cost housing around the world. Not even Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer, a lifelong communist, has bothered.

As Coll points out, it's still about the money: "You have to adjust to a lot of realities, including that of your own fee." So how did it come to pass that Madrid's regional and municipal governments decided to contract so-called "starchitects" such as Britain's David Chipperfield, or American Thom Mayne, or Dutch outfit MVRDV to oversee huge projects such as the city's working-class Carabanchel district, or the greenfield Sanchinarro?

Miguel Ángel Prieto, an architect who works for Madrid's municipal housing company EMV, accepts that the big names have not always lived up to their reputations and that the people who have to live in the homes they design are far from impressed.

To make matters worse, these vast projects garner headlines in the world of architecture: "They are guilty of generating a kind of architectural tourism that can be annoying to residents," he says.

That said, Prieto insists that Madrid's intentions were good: "It was a time when we were looking for ways not just to keep residents happy, but also to create an image for the capital." What's more, he says that the big names weren't necessarily given big budgets: Arata Isozaki, responsible for Barcelona's vast Palau Sant Jordi concert hall was given a budget of 500 euros per square meter.

But other regions have managed to find solutions closer to home. Luis G. Tamarit, an urban planner who oversaw Andalusia's housing policy between 1988 and 2008, says that self-build is the way forward.

He says that this approach provides work to local architects and builders, gives people a say in how their homes will be built, and is 40-percent cheaper than the vast schemes of the state. Some 3,500 homes were built in the region in this way.

"And then neo-liberal policies were introduced. Self-build was seen as old-fashioned, inefficient, and we got rid of it, and replaced it with nothing," he says. Tamarit now works in international cooperation, but says that self-build has not been taken up in the developing world.

Now it seems that young architects are to be given a chance. "Times have changed, and we feel that we should support our own architects through open bidding," says the EMV's Prieto. "Younger architects are more pushy, they are innovative, and don't mind breaking the rules," he says.

"Building low-cost housing is very difficult. Budgets are tight, and you have to be very enthusiastic, prepared to work with little money, and under a lot of constraints," say David Casino and Bernardo Angelini, who won this year's Biannual Architecture Prize for low-cost housing in Mieres in Asturias.

They say that the decision by a growing number of regional and municipal administrations to allow smaller architects' firms to bid for low-cost housing construction has made it possible for many architects to get their start in the profession. They say that they are not interested in what they call "creating a town's identity," more in repairing it. The houses they designed in Mieres were about "breaking the traditional construction around a central courtyard. It is easier to change things on the basis of what exists, and what we know. That is applicable to a society, but we wanted to remodel a rigid kind of town planning that doesn't work. We wanted to work with the landscape, and to let more light into homes, for example."

Jaume Coll, designer of low-cost rental-only apartments in the Pardinyes neighborhood behind the AVE high-speed train station in the Catalan city of Lleida, talks in terms of the Indian concept of jugaad, which means "creative improvization with limited resources." It's a bottom up, rather than top-down approach. "We have to really take that approach on board, and come up with ideas that point to the future," he argues.

The apartments in Lleida measure just 58-square meters, but Coll and his partner Judith Leclerc found simple solutions to make the most of limited space, using sliding doors, as well as allowing as much light in as possible.

Oscar Rueda and María José Pizarro live in a low-cost rental apartment in the Madrid dormitory town of Parla. They were involved in the design of the property, as well as in the communal areas of the apartment complex.

It is also finally being understood by urban planners and architects that more care needs to be taken over the way that homes connect with the neighborhood around them. "For too many years now we have only been interested in designing architectural objects instead of thinking about how to design what is in effect the growth of the city. The time has come to make amends," says Luis Diaz-Mauriño, who along with Mónica Alberola and Chinina Martorell won the award for best low-cost housing at the most recent Spanish architecture biannual, the sector's top event.

"We are finally beginning to see a few changes that suggest that after many years of worshipping the autistic building, architecture is finally beginning to reconnect with people and the space around it. That said, we are still facing an uphill struggle against decades of inertia. We need to come up with some ideas that will change the way we have traditionally done things and allow us to come up with spaces that permit us to interact with the environment around us," says Mauriño.

Emiliano López, a Barcelona-based architect, blames the town planners. "The thinking behind the new neighborhoods being built on the outskirts of our cities does not emphasize the importance of the street in the lives of people. They don't work at the level of the pedestrian, they are designed for cars, and tend to have a single shopping center that houses everything: shops, leisure, even the arts: terrible," he says. He and Mónica Rivera won the FAD architecture prize last year for their building to house people aged under 35 in the Sant Andreu district of Barcelona, which was based around a series of terraces that would create a sense of community.

Alejandro San Felipe and Francisco Lacruz took a similar approach to the apartment block they designed in Huesca, and which won them a prize in 2006.

The principles that are now increasingly being rewarded are attention to the details inside an apartment, rather than the overall design. And younger architects are getting it right more often than the big names. It's rather like a master chef who no longer knows how to peel a potato: too many architects have forgotten how to make the most out of 50 square meters. "Architects are still competing with each other to see who can come up with the most amusing, colorful and banal block; they are still seeing buildings as an object. But a collection of objects doesn't make a city," says López.

It seems that Spain has failed to learn the lessons of low-cost housing experiments in the United States or the rest of Europe, where the large-scale projects lacking in ameneties built in the 1960s and 1970s have proved a catastrophic failure.

Perhaps the only silver lining of the collapse of the housing market is that it might encourage a return to the basic principles that make some cities work: building on a human scale, and with facilities that make the streets safe And perhaps the best people to implement that approach are those who still live in the real world.