The cycle ‘Unboxing the library. A look at the Library’s holdings’, the activity promoted by the Library of the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC) in order to give greater visibility to the bibliographic wealth it holds, follows its course.

On this occasion, the architect and visual artist María García Ruiz – curator together with Moisés Puente of the exhibition ‘The city in dispute’ – will comment on different collective experiments around social housing in southern Europe during 1949 and 1976 by means of a series of books.

‘The city in dispute’ presents a series of unique experiences around social housing that were carried out in several moments of crisis and that, in their own way, reinvented the paradigms of modernity and the relationship between architecture and its inhabitants. They were spatial practices in which communities played a fundamental role in terms of establishing their own place in the city and in which architects took on the challenge of reinventing worlds from below. Starting from the neorealist reconstruction of post-war Italy, the avant-garde proposals of the Poblados Dirigidos in Spain, up to the housing experiments that gave rise to the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, this exhibition questions the ways in which they intersect architecture and social conflict, putting the poetic rigor of the design, the staging of new problems regarding minimal housing, and the embodied desire of bodies located until then on the margins of history on the line.