Innovation and Experimentation for Sustainable City in the Antonio Rueda Housing Complex (Valencia, Spain)

In the last century, cities have had huge expansion and an ever-increasing need for housing, which is still a hot button issue today. In the 1960s, after the serious damage caused by the flooding of the Turia River on 14 and 15 October 1957, the City of Valencia launched a major plan of social housing to meet the housing needs for displaced people and low-income workers. The housing program was entrusted to the public institution of the Franco regime Obra Sindical del Hogar (OSH) and financed by the national government with aid funds received from foreign states. The work focuses on one the last interventions by the OSH, the Antonio Rueda social housing complex with 1,002 dwellings of different types designed Vicente Valls Abad, Joaquín García Sanz and Luis Marés Feliú in 1965 in a 10 hectare plot in the southwest sector of the city. The housing complex was built between 1969 and 1972 and named after Franco’s civil governor Antonio Rueda. It was designed to accommodate families from different social classes and different housing needs, avoiding the construction of ghetto quarters that make contemporary cities unlivable. Through the study of unpublished sources and on-site surveys, the work describes the architectural design of the housing complex, highlighting its innovations and experimentation on both urban and building-scale. The work reveals the role of the city’s sustainability driver that the designers were able to give to the architectural design of the housing complex, which should be recognized and protected as Modern Movement heritage.