Given the intentional crudeness of its language, its expressive forcefulness, its fragmented layout around collective spaces as well as how it incorporates aerial connections and galleries, some authors have referred to the Neighbourhood Unit of El Taray (Segovia, 1962-1964) as a neobrutalist complex. Indeed, the design by José Joaquín Aracil (1930-2009) belongs to a moment of architecture history, both at a Spanish level and internationally, when trends had moved beyond rationalism and there was a renewed interest in the city, all of which was linked mainly with the experiences of Team 10.
However, El Taray is more than a unique building of its time. Beyond its adherence to a certain trend, it responds to a pressing need for adaptation. The model of communal living is a political manifesto. The layout is the result of a setting with extreme conditions. The form comes from the high density demanded by the workers cooperative that commissioned the project. The expression is the product of common sense and sensitivity that the architecture trade provides, all at the service of the few, available resources. With the establishment, the budget and the topography all against him, at El Taray, Aracil produced advanced solutions regarding hot issues such as the integration of the new in the historic city, community life or the concept of low-cost luxury.
Supported by unpublished material from the Aracil Legacy —a collection that has been inventoried by the author of this research— this thesis aims at bringing to the forefront of the debate a case which has appeared regularly in Spanish housing anthologies but that nevertheless has not been approached from the point of view of architecture design theory. Given this premise, this research probes into Aracil’s design thinking with two goals. The first is to reveal the patterns of his frank, intuitive and committed way of practicing architecture. The second is to sound out its validity in the present. This work departs from the hypothesis that, beyond stylistic labels, El Taray synthesizes a timeless modus operandi of conceiving residential projects within the consolidated city.
The contextual, the topological, the typological, the semantical and the liminal are proposed as the starting points from which El Taray was thought up from and built. They make up the themes of the project narrative, threads that we can untangle nowadays, due the persistence of certain conditions in collective housing architecture, such as social emergency, economic restrictions, the physical limitations of a site or political and administrative obstructions.