Barcelona's La Borda fits 28 homes around a shared courtyard

La Borda is a six-storey cooperative housing project in Barcelona's Sants neighborhood. It contains 28 homes in three sizes: 40, 60 and 75 m2. The building also includes a kitchen-dining room, laundry, multipurpose room, guest space, care space, greenhouses, a patio and a rooftop terrace. 1

That list explains the project's central idea: some parts of domestic life are shared instead of being repeated inside every apartment. The result is a housing block organized around a common indoor-outdoor life, rather than a corridor leading only to private front doors.

The homes and galleries surround a large central courtyard. Lacol describes the arrangement as a contemporary echo of the corrala, a traditional Spanish housing form in which circulation and neighborly contact happen around a shared space. The Guardian likewise describes the courtyard as a meeting place and a source of natural ventilation. 12

La Borda was developed by residents and built on land leased from Barcelona City Council for 75 years. It is a transfer-of-use cooperative, a model in which the cooperative manages the building and members hold the right to live in their homes rather than treating each flat as a conventional resale asset. Lacol describes the project as Barcelona's first transfer-of-use cooperative housing project on public land. 1

The non-speculative goal is part of the architecture, not an extra policy layer. The Guardian reported that members cannot sell or pass on individual flats, while shared rooms include the kitchen-dining area, laundry and guest rooms. 2

Completed in 2018, the building has about 3,000 m2 of floor area. Its six-storey structure uses cross-laminated timber, or CLT, made from layers of wood bonded at right angles. The EUmies Awards project page describes La Borda as the highest building constructed with a timber structure in Spain. 34

La Borda's curiosity is easy to miss from the street. The headline is 28 homes, but the more revealing number is one: one courtyard, one laundry, one shared dining space and a network of rooms that lets the building act as more than a stack of private apartments.