La Borda

The closest single-building match to this brief.

City

Barcelona

Year

2018

Height

6 stories

Homes

Architect

Lacol

Structure

Timber

Tenure

Co-op, cession of use

Land

75-yr public lease

Twenty-eight households on Can Batlló land the city leases for 75 years, organized as a cooperative in cession of use: nobody owns a unit, nobody can flip one, everyone owns the building together. Lacol — a cooperative of architects, several of them residents — stacked six timber stories around a full-height central patio in the Barcelona corrala tradition. Access is by open galleries around the patio; the glazed roof turns it into a winter greenhouse and, opened in summer, a ventilation chimney. The building is a climate machine and a social machine with the same part.

What to steal: the ground floor. Street-facing commercial space plus the cooperative's own shared kitchen-dining room, laundry, and guest rooms — so the building's cheapest square meters carry its social life, and private units can stay modest.

Fig. 04 — Section through a La Borda–style atrium. Illustrative, drawn from published descriptions.

The full-height patio — corrala tradition, glazed above

The open-air timber galleries: every front door faces the shared middle

The rear facade, facing the Can Batlló grounds

Six timber stories meeting Carrer Constitució

Lessons for Berkeley

Public land on a long lease removes the land cost that kills Bay Area co-ops — look for city or district parcels first.
One patio can be the circulation, the climate system, and the social room. Don't buy three systems where one section works.
Shared kitchen, laundry, and guest rooms let private units shrink honestly — affordability by design, not subsidy alone.
Cession of use is the tenure translation target: limited-equity co-op plus a land trust gets closest under California law.
Residents in the design team (Lacol's model) is a process, not a luxury — it is how the building stayed cheap and specific.

Sources: project publications by Lacol and the La Borda cooperative — laborda.coop · lacol.coop

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