Marta Peris: "The desert of the crisis taught us how to solve many things with few resources"

BarcelonaFrom the very first moment, research on collective housing has been the central axis of the work of architect Marta Peris (Palma, 1972), the founder of the studio Peris+Toral together with her husband, José Manuel Toral. Currently, they are one of the most cutting-edge and awarded studios: among the accolades received by their block of 85 social housing units made of wood in Cornellà, known as Modulus Matrix, are the RIBA International Award and the awards from the Spanish Colleges of Architects. This Monday they will be at the UIA international congress to talk about domestic space as a "social project". "The congress will be a platform that will facilitate exchange, transversality, looking at each other and sharing things. Since what interests us is housing, it will be another scenario to highlight the work done here. Since we have it close by, it seems normal to us, but when you travel the world you realize it is extraordinary. The social housing built in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands is observed from all over the world," states Marta Peris. "And, above all, it will be a place for exchange with models like the Swiss one or that of the city of Vienna, where there is a very powerful social model," she emphasizes.

She did her doctoral thesis on Japanese houses through the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu. What did you discover in Ozu's films?

— Ozu's cinema portrays life in the 1950s. He basically filmed indoors, and what he did was, in a way, make visible the way of inhabiting. When you look at the floor plan of a Japanese house, it is totally unintelligible: you see a lot of rooms modulated with tatami mats, interconnected, but you don't even know where the dining room is, it's impossible to intuit how to live in it. This seemed fascinating to me. Ozu films it in a way that enhances the potential of the house, and that's what fascinated me, because in the Japanese houses of the 1950s I found attributes that could be totally transferable to contemporary needs or ways of inhabiting, and which I considered very useful.

What are these attributes?

— To begin with, the Japanese house is very porous; this means it is highly interconnected. Each room has between three and four double doors. Everything is modulated by the tatami, with openings of one meter eighty. This makes the house, which is actually a succession of adjoining spaces, offer many possibilities for interconnection through the air. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Japanese house is that it is the result of an adaptation to the climate, especially to the summer, which in Japan is very humid, and the house is designed so that the air circulates and compensates for this humidity. This great interconnection also makes it very porous visually. Even if you are in a space of relatively reduced dimensions, this space immediately expands because there are always visual escapes that connect all areas. And, above all, there are many ways to move through it: there is no single itinerary. It is not like in a Western house, where the typological scheme is usually a corridor with sealed rooms; here everything is absolutely interconnected.

How is climate adaptation and sustainability approached?

— We opt for the passive path, and the idea is that spaces do not require energy or that they manage to reduce energy consumption to the maximum. Here comes all the bioclimatic architecture, all the passive systems proper to Mediterranean architecture. The objective is to need less, rather than to consume efficiently. It is the shift from the paradigm of efficiency to that of sufficiency. And this is concretized, basically, through intermediate spaces, through winter heat gain strategies; nothing that, on the other hand, is not already present in vernacular architecture, but reinterpreted and reintegrated into our current conditions and our way of designing with these bioclimatic mechanisms. Furthermore, they are strategies that are not only environmental but also social: these atria become spaces for relationships that foster encounters between people. On the other hand, instead of the paradigm of homothermy – achieving that all spaces are at the same temperature – we propose the idea of heterothermy: heat sources in winter, thermal gradients. For us, gradients are fundamental. The idea of comfort not as spatial uniformity, but as the possibility of experiencing different conditions, in which the body adapts and perceives comfort precisely through change. There is a very important book for us, Thermal delight in architecture [The pleasure of thermal delight in architecture]. When we are always at the same temperature, we do not perceive when something improves. Therefore, this idea of comfort is closely linked to this notion of heterothermy.

How has your work evolved?

— I believe that evolution occurred through the crisis. Although it is not housing, the turning point that the Glòries Information Point represented for us is very important, because it completely changed our way of approaching projects with very few resources and almost thinking about buildings in layers, to understand their essence. It is about trying to strip down structures, avoid cladding, take advantage of the properties and performance of materials, and have the same material serve many purposes at once: to have inertia, to fulfill structural functions. All this evolution occurs mainly in that desert we crossed during the crisis and in this reflection on how to solve many things with very few resources. Instead of making each layer independent with a constructive function, it is about integrating many performances and functions into the same elements and with very few components.

And what about housing?

— Typologically, I believe there is a wide range of typologies that foster different ways of inhabiting. The first project we did at Can Caralleu, which was already a finalist for the FAD, proposed an exempt core with circulation around it, which we later revisited at Les Glòries, and these are very small homes but they ensure that, above all, the essence of the house is that of a space that seems much larger than it is. For us, this is very important in social housing: that with very few elements you get a return, a feeling of being in a much larger and generally more comfortable space. This is how double circulations are generated, houses that seem larger than they are. These double circulations continue to be present in our patterns, such as in the earth houses of Ibiza and in the Modulus Matrix building in Cornellà. They are homes that do not have watertight rooms; almost all have at least two doors and all the routes interconnect. The house changes a lot depending on the direction in which you move through it: you discover it, the body, the gaze, and the space are related. This is very important to us. Therefore, spatial perception is key to the way of inhabiting. For us, there is a whole constructive, physical dimension, of materials that you can touch. But there is also a perceptual dimension that has to do with emptiness, with visuals, with how a home is emptied and how space is perceived, how it is inhabited, how it generates memories.

Are regulations an obstacle to your ideas?

— We understand that regulations are necessary. Starting from this basis, we don't find them bad. What does happen is that any project that, for us, brings something always pushes the limits of the regulations. It is necessary to know how to interpret them and it is necessary to know how to explain them. And we have often found ourselves needing to find this limit, almost of illegality, of interpretation itself. This is why housing is so local. Because we need to know the regulations in depth to push them to the limit, to be able to discuss them and to be able to open a field of interpretation that allows us, with the technicians and the interlocutors we have on the other side, to do things that are not usual. The most usual thing is that when you go anywhere they tell you: "They don't let us do this here," as is the case with atria. When we started building atria, it was very difficult to convince them that rooms could be ventilated through atria. Well, now we have managed that the general planning – through the metropolitan building ordinances (OME) – incorporates atria and that they can be built in a simpler way. It was a fight, a whole fight, to achieve this kind of interpretation of the regulations.

What role does the public sector play?

— The public sector is not only the most receptive sector, but also the one that has the responsibility, the duty, and the power to change things. This requires a determined attitude, which also depends on the people on the other side. There must be an idea of exemplary action. You can face the housing emergency in quantitative terms, responding to a problem of the number of families, or you can think that what you do paves the way and allows you to win small battles until you change or transform the model. And this is where the issue lies. Right now, we are fortunate that in Barcelona there are a series of public developers who have truly taken all the paradigms of sustainability and flexibility seriously. We have great public developers, especially IMPSOL, who have committed to this idea of exemplary action, who take into account the mastery of the territory's resources. Private entities do not have this awareness.

What is the most urgent thing to change in public housing policies?

— It is fundamental to take externalities into account. For example, there is something beautiful and that is that the same concrete industry, which generates many emissions, can be transformed towards the earth with a different formulation, but it is the same infrastructure. But, to do this, it requires an effort. Taxes could be introduced that levy construction according to its footprint on the territory. When this happens, construction with wood, which now seems so expensive, or construction with earth, which requires an effort, will cease to be so unaffordable. It will be able to be competitive and truly begin to enter the paradigm. We have already seen interesting things: during the time that there was a progressive government in the Balearic Islands, the tourist tax was allocated to the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI), because it was considered that tourism aggravated the housing problem. This, in addition to being very intelligent, has allowed the construction of an IBAVI model that now has visibility worldwide. We must look beyond the cost of the building; the cost must be considered in a broad, holistic sense, not just what the work or the construction module costs, but also what it implies for the territory and for society.