Building with 30 apartments between party walls on Enamorats Street

The project is located at 40-44 Enamorats Street in Barcelona. It is a new construction project for a multi-family residential building between party walls, with a facade on Enamorats Street and the interior of the block.

It consists of 4 basement parking levels, a ground floor with access to the residences and parking, and commercial premises, and 5 residential floors. The roof is flat and has common services, such as drying areas or a community pool.

On the first floor, taking advantage of the roof of the commercial premises that extends beyond the building limit of the upper floors, there are private terraces for the residences on this floor, each of which has its own private pool. The area of the plot that is not built upon remains as a courtyard for the commercial premises.

The vertical communication of the building is carried out through two vertical cores formed by a compartmentalized staircase and a functional elevator; the latter connects all floors, including the parking areas and the roof. The parking areas have two staircases, which can be accessed from Enamorats Street, with independent access from the residences.

The building features a linear courtyard in the center of the floor plan, ensuring that all the apartments have cross ventilation.

The number of housing units resulting from the project is 30.

Enamorats Street diagonally crosses part of the orthogonal layout of the Eixample, defining irregularly shaped blocks on both sides. The project site is located in one of these blocks which, due to this layout, has smaller dimensions than the canonical ones of Cerdà. This fact makes the buildable depths of the block (17m) smaller than the standard of the Eixample (~25m).

This non-standard depth makes it necessary to create courtyards for the ventilation and lighting of the rooms located in the middle of the floor, with the UN defining a proportion of this type of courtyards as 12% of the buildable area.

A linear courtyard has been introduced in the center of the floor plan, allowing cross ventilation to all the residences.

On the main and rear facades, a 1.50m longitudinal balcony runs along the facades, leaving at least one meter on both sides of the party walls.

The project includes commercial spaces on the ground floor, residential units on the upper floors, and parking in the basement levels.

On the deck, the installation spaces (air conditioning machines and RITS) as well as drying areas and a community pool are located.

The parking lot is located on the four basement floors. Access is from the ground floor via the vehicle ramp, located at the end of the facade, and through two independent stairwells that only connect to the parking lot, one of which also has an elevator, and through the residential cores via elevators.

The parking lot has 81 spaces for cars.

On the -1 floor, conveniently sectorized with respect to evacuation and parking elements, there is an area with 10 storage rooms.

The building has 2 ground floor premises with access from Enamorats Street and features an open courtyard in the interior of the block.

The program of the 30 housing units is structured through two independent staircases, staircase A and staircase B, each equipped with an elevator that connects all floors of the building and a staircase that starts at the ground floor and reaches the rooftop.

Staircase A (15 apartments): all residential floors have 3 apartments per landing, 1 one-bedroom apartment, 1 two-bedroom apartment, and another three-bedroom apartment.

Staircase B (15 apartments): Identical to staircase A, 15 apartments, 3 per landing, with the same proportion of 1, 2, and 3-bedroom units.

In total, there are 10 three-bedroom homes, 10 two-bedroom homes, and 10 one-bedroom homes.

The typologies are organized into two strips parallel to the facade. In the strip facing the street or the interior of the block: the main living spaces, living rooms, and bedrooms are placed, while in the strip facing the light well: the service areas, kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry rooms are placed. All the apartments have a balcony facing the street or the inner courtyard and feature cross ventilation.

The first-floor apartments with a facade to the interior of the block have access to the interior patio, just like the three-bedroom apartment with a facade to Enamorats Street. The apartments with a facade to the interior of the block also have a terrace in the block patio with a pool that is above the ground-floor commercial premises.

The heating and domestic hot water systems for each dwelling are of the air-source heat pump type. Each dwelling has its own heat pump and an interior unit of the Hydrobox type for the production of domestic hot water, independently controlled by each dwelling.

Air-source heat pumps provide more useful energy in the form of heat than the electrical energy they consume, potentially achieving savings of up to 40% compared to a conventional heating system if used properly.

The ventilation is through a double-flow mechanical ventilation system with heat recovery, with supply and return air conducted through a duct system.

Air is supplied to each room and extracted through bathrooms and kitchens up to the roof level. This system provides comfort to air quality and energy savings through ventilation exchange.

It improves the values established in the DB HE and DB HR of the CTE by 18.75% as the building envelope has been designed to be a nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The energy rating of the building is AA. A in non-renewable primary energy consumption and A in carbon dioxide emissions. This implies a minimum energy consumption of 58kWh/m2 per year.