República Argentina dwellings in Barcelona
Multi-family residential building between party walls in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood.
Can Bisa is a "Torre de Indiano" (a large house built by a returning emigrant) from the end of the 19th century, currently owned by the Town Hall of Vilassar de Mar. Surrounded by a small garden, it sits on the Riera de Cabrils and occupies part of a block in which there also used to be a factory, now demolished. Its historical and heritage value and the strategic position that it occupies in the urban complex meant that the town council considered it a suitable location to house cultural facilities and at the same time they came up with the idea of completing the set with a social housing building.
The development of the design of the facilities demonstrated the impossibility of accommodating all the uses in the interior of Can Bisa, so it was basically used for municipal offices and different clubs and entities, placing those with the largest area in the ground floor premises of the housing building.
The General Plan determined two volumes for the housing united in the shape of an “L” but of different heights to respect the different gauges of the streets. The plan also determined that both be situated on a larger sized base that was intended to house a small auditorium, various meeting rooms, and a bar.
It was the intention of the project to unify the volume by means of a single sloping roof, to build a continuous façade towards the streets from which the dwellings are accessed and to articulate the internal volume to favour the relationship with the house. The passage that is generated between the Torre de Indiano and the residential building becomes the main access to the whole. Its dimension gives it the character of a patio and, together with the gardens around Can Bisa, it forms a chain of spaces for leisure time that complement the activities offered by the facilities. Some flowerpots created expressly by the ceramist Carme Balada provide structure to the whole.
Both the housing building and the mansion are treated with a surface finish of white stucco textured in strips of variable width and different finishes. The balconies and porticos are metallic and the lattices, ceramic. In one of the façades, a fragment of the former factory wall is symbolically maintained.