Valencia: Housing and Open City

Valencia: Housing and Open City analyses Jaime Roig Street as an urban laboratory where, throughout the 1950s to 1970s, different ways of designing collective housing were tested. Far from presenting a catalogue of notable buildings, the research focuses on relationships: between pieces, between scales, between the public and the private.

The book starts from an intriguing hypothesis: the street can be read as a transitional episode between traditional housing between party walls and modern models of open building. Through rigorous redrawing, documentation and comparative analysis, the design decisions of a generation of Valencian architects are reconstructed. In a context of urban transformation, these architects experimented with new ways of organising housing, access, the ground floor and the relationship with the outdoor space.

One of the greatest successes of the publication is to shift the focus from the individual building to the whole. None of the works analysed is intended to be exemplary in itself; however, it is precisely in their accumulation, their sequence and their perception in motion that their urban value emerges. As the text itself suggests, the street functions as a ‘face’ whose identity does not reside in each isolated feature, but in the combination of all of them.

In this sense, the concept of the ‘open city’ takes on a central role. Permeable ground floors, intermediate spaces, gardens and setbacks, as well as the dissolution of strict boundaries between public and private, shape an urban model where domesticity extends into the street and the city becomes more liveable. In contrast to the rigidity of other urban fabrics, what is proposed here is a spatial continuity that, even today, is particularly evocative.

On a domestic scale, the book also offers a precise reading of the bourgeois housing of the time: its organisation in bands, the hierarchy between spaces of representation, private areas and service areas, as well as the tensions between tradition and modernity. The gradual appearance of the corridor, the reduction of surface areas and the transformation of communication hubs reflect profound changes in the way of living.

Beyond its value as a historical document, this publication stands out for its ability to turn analysis into a design tool. The systematic redrawing of floor plans, sections and elevations is not just a graphic exercise, but a way of understanding and reactivating strategies that remain relevant in contemporary architecture.