A “modular” housing block where each apartment can be potentially expanded or reduced by adding or subtracting rooms according to necessity: here’s the housing system of tomorrow as seen by Catalonian studio Maio, who just remodelled the classic dwelling tradition in Barcelona’s hip Eixample.

Here lies 110 Rooms, whose name is synonym with a one-of-a-kind philosophy: rooms are indeed acknowledged as the independent cores of domestic life, and also as the actual trigger of any architectural and living process.

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Jose Hevia

Developing onto 5 different storeys, Maio’s building in Barcelona is an apartment block from which any spatial hierarchy or program predetermination was intentionally banned: with this sort of flexibility in mind, rooms are similar in size and connected among them, so that no corridor or hallway is needed.

Each floor comprises 4 standard apartments of 5 rooms each – an easily adjustable spatial layout conceived to fulfil the future needs of its inhabitants.

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Jose Hevia
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Jose Hevia

This flexibility and high degree of customisation result from the position of all facilities rooms, nestled at the very centre of each dwelling unit. So apart from the bathrooms and kitchenettes placed in the middle, where all installations are located as points for supply, the additional rooms can be used as bedrooms, living rooms, and so on.

Architects at Maio made sure that the amounts of natural air and natural were equally distributed throughout the habitats, including a set of outdoor terraces, the traditional wooden shutters, and an inner patio allowing for proper ventilation.

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Jose Hevia
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Jose Hevia

Such innovative response is actually well rooted in the past, and especially in the 18th century’s typological housing tradition of the Eixample neighbourhood. Indeed, the type plants are formalized following the distribution of equal (or almost equal) rooms that traditionally characterized the housing blocks in the area: an archetypal feature that allowed the apartments to modify the way they have been used over the decades without substantial architectonical changes.

This seemingly rigid system now relives in 100 Rooms, with ancient traditions being celebrating here and there across the property: see the façade, whose finishing is done with traditional lime stucco and whose composition aims at replicating the pre-existent: vertical openings, balconies and wood shutters.

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Jose Hevia

Lastly, the ground floor of 110 Rooms recovers the popular language of traditional Eixample's halls, where, through furniture and large habitable objects, the space was designed to house different uses and destinations. Here, these furniture pieces are transformed into marble volumes in the middle of a large open space, where it literally rains encouraging to understand the hall as an extension of the street.

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Jose Hevia