San Isidoro Homes, Palmas Altas, Seville
A U-shaped block of subsidised housing around a central communal space
How can subsidised housing bring urban quality to a neighbourhood still taking shape?
San Isidoro arranges its 136 homes in a U-shaped block that frees up a central communal space and, on the outside, builds a street frontage of terraces clad in two tones. Every home has two façades and cross-ventilation through the courtyards.
Palmas Altas Sur is one of the new neighbourhoods in the south of Seville, a growth area where the city is taking shape block by block. Here, Fundación VIMPYCA has built 136 subsidised homes on a 4,779 m² plot, with a garage, storage rooms, a pool and shared gardens. EDDEA carried out the site supervision from the building permit, in March 2023, through to handover, in June 2025.
San Isidoro is part of EDDEA's long collaboration with Fundación VIMPYCA, a charitable foundation devoted to subsidised housing, with which the studio has now designed five projects in Seville, its metropolitan area and the Costa del Sol. One of them is its twin in this same neighbourhood: Santa Lucía, another 136 subsidised homes built to the same principles. The challenge was to offer high-quality subsidised housing while giving form to streets that still lacked any buildings of reference. The scheme responds with a block that opens towards a shared inner space and draws a crisp edge to the street.
A U-shaped block around a shared space
Two symmetrical six-storey blocks are joined by a three-storey central wing that houses the main entrance. Between them, the ground floor frees up an open central space, with the pool and children's play areas, which connects with the inner courtyards. The corners are taken up by private terraces.
The courtyards cut through the building and give every home two façades and cross-ventilation, a quality usually found in market-rate housing that here extends to the entire subsidised programme. The scheme brings together 18 home types: 12 two-bedroom, 108 three-bedroom and 16 four-bedroom homes, six of them adapted for accessibility, distributed across six entrance cores.
A façade for a new neighbourhood
Towards the street, the building occupies the entire edge of the plot. The shifting position of the terraces composes the elevation, with continuous two-tone cladding and louvred screens that filter some of the openings. Inside, the entrance halls and staircases are lined in marble, and the homes have oak floors and beech doors.
Below ground, the basement holds 136 parking spaces, one per home, and 136 storage rooms.
