Urban Housing Platform, Andalusia
An expert system for designing industrialised, green and affordable housing on every plot
Can industrialisation produce subsidised housing that is different on every plot, green from the very first line and affordable?
VIVA turns the regulations, climate and surroundings of each plot into design constraints and composes the buildings from an open catalogue of 219 construction elements. Energy, carbon, cost and industrialisation are assessed as the design takes shape, while it is still open to change. The same industrial catalogue produces different buildings on every plot.
For the Agencia de Vivienda y Rehabilitación de Andalucía (AVRA), the region’s public housing agency, the VIVA joint venture—EDDEA, Ghenova, Tecnalia and AICIA—is developing the Vivienda Industrializada Verde Asequible (Green Affordable Industrialised Housing) system, its response to the nZEISHB innovative public procurement call: a system of industrialised, nearly zero-energy subsidised housing. Within the joint venture, EDDEA shares the technical direction and is responsible for the conceptual and regulatory framework, the modular catalogue and the urban, building and economic indicators.
The work extends the multi-scale design methodology that the studio presented to AVRA in 2023, with one aim: to industrialise housing in order to create buildings that differ from one another, yet are mass-produced, built green and affordable.
From method to innovative public procurement
The starting point is a catalogue of standardised urban elements that organises the city by scale—districts, sectors, superblocks and blocks, a hierarchical street network, dwelling modules and wet cores, public facilities and open spaces—and links the territory to the building component, from the layout of the district to the export of each piece into BIM environments.
On that basis, in 2024 AVRA put out to tender the development and validation of an expert system for the fast, efficient design of nearly zero-energy modular housing, in three successive phases: proof of concept, experimental development and non-commercial demonstrator. In October 2026 the joint venture delivered the first phase, with a functional tool already up and running in a trial version.
Four dilemmas and one system
VIVA responds to four dilemmas that hold industrialised housing back. Every plot has its own sun, climate, surroundings and regulations; if solutions are repeated, industry wins and the city loses, and if they are varied, architecture wins but the factory cannot keep up; energy and carbon are calculated only once the design is closed; and industry lacks a common language with which to know whom it is manufacturing for.
To resolve them, the system brings together a modular catalogue of 22 main and 10 auxiliary modules, which combine into 9 types and 17 variants and are built from 219 elements—four bathrooms, 127 vertical panels and 88 horizontal ones—and an open marketplace in which manufacturers publish their solutions in interoperable formats. An expert system works through four phases—contextualisation, configuration, optimisation and deliverables—and moves from territorial data to the BIM model: it checks twenty urban planning indicators against the plot’s regulations in real time, calculates energy demand and solar access as the scheme is composed, and compares alternatives against criteria of sustainability, industrialisation and investment.
A test on the plot
The proof of concept has been measured on a test development of 114 homes and 11,865 m² built, with an average usable floor area of 72.56 m², a footprint covering 27.5% of the plot and not a single north-facing home. The buildings all differ from one another, yet are built with pieces from the same catalogue of 219 elements.
If it passes the first-phase evaluation, in which it competes with one other proposal, the second phase will take the system to the urban scale, from street to block, bring manufacturers into the solutions marketplace and extend the BIM chain all the way to the tender model.
