Beyond formal and informal: mid-twentieth-century residential architecture in Barcelona’s El Carmel neighbourhood

Abstract

This article discusses houses on the periphery of Barcelona and in particular in the El Carmel neighbourhood, which were built by poor country-to-city migrants from southern Spain in the post-World War II period. They were constructed following two typologies: barracas (sheds), one-storey huts on an irregular street plan, and coreas (‘Korea houses’), more formally looking one- to three-storey structures lined up on orderly laid-out streets. Based on archival documents, contemporaneous publications and interviews with former autoconstructores (self-builders), the article analyses both social conditions and physical structures. While these buildings were often unauthorized and constructed by informal means, they were just as often built with the landowner’s consent, involving architects and building professionals, and retroactively legalized. The article concludes that in this respect Barcelona’s ‘informal neighbourhoods’ in fact straddled the realms of the formal and the informal, to the extent that the habitual distinction between formal and informal architecture has to be considered inadequate.