EB 6- Single Family Houses

Issue 6 of En Blanco focuses on single-family housing, examining how contemporary architecture uses concrete —and particularly the concrete block— as a means of articulating space, material, and landscape.

The volume opens with the essay Normal Blocks by Raúl Castellanos and Débora Domingo, which traces the evolution of the concrete block from its origins as an economical nineteenth-century material to its later recognition within modern architecture. Through figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis I. Kahn, Aldo van Eyck, and Herman Hertzberger, the text reveals how an apparently ordinary material can acquire a powerful tectonic, symbolic, and spatial dimension.

Building on this reflection, the issue presents an international selection of single-family houses that explore different ways of relating architecture, construction, and territory. Among them is the Casa en Jardín del Sol in Tenerife by Corona and P. Amaral Arquitectos, where a sharply defined concrete volume faces the Atlantic landscape, oscillating between the clarity of a constructed object and the intention of dissolving into its surroundings.

Alongside this project, the issue includes works by practices such as BAK Arquitectos, Studio MK27, Sou Fujimoto, Max Núñez and Bernardo Valdés, Charles Pictet, and Davide Macullo, forming a broad and diverse panorama of contemporary housing across different geographical contexts. In all of them, concrete appears not only as a construction system but also as a medium capable of shaping atmospheres, framing the landscape, and establishing new relationships between interior and exterior space.

More than a simple collection of houses, this issue offers a reflection on the capacity of domestic architecture to construct a precise relationship between material, space, and experience. En Blanco 6. Single-Family Housing shows how concrete can become a sensitive and rigorous language through which to rethink contemporary dwelling.