Housing in Casas Baratas Neighborhood / Óscar Pedrós arquitecto

Contemporary actions in the area of ​​the Colonia de Casas Baratas Juan Canalejo (the 1950s) (as known in Spanish by The Neighborhood of Cheap Houses) have distorted its “typology”, if we understand as a type not only the condition of semi-detached house freed from auxiliary buildings but also a language of the facade that, we insist, found the conditions for an aesthetic uniformity due to economic reasons. Nowadays, there is not a single reconstructed or rebuilt house that maintains the initial composition and that introduces us to an even more complex reality: in the modest Neighborhood, there were buildings with one and two floors, whose design was already resolved on the original project. That is to say: its condition of different heights had already been resolved from the coherence of the project. What happens then, when on an original building of a unique plan, the Master Plan allows building a new one on top?