"A good design must take into account the users' variability regarding sex, size, age, culture, skill, strength, and other characteristics that meet human needs and limitations, managing to improve all its users' quality of life."
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L'Eixample de Mar is a development that takes into account its future users' possible mobility problems. Throughout our lives or those of our relatives, we can all undergo reduced mobility. Everyday mobility becomes a serious problem due to an inappropriate design of the home we live in.
There are homes designed bearing in mind certain ergonomic characteristics that will go unnoticed by most users, but that will be of vital importance for those people that need them and can find them easily.
An accessible home implies it has a degree of comfort, safety and superior quality. This is a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by most users that, over the years, might undergo functional limitations. Having a home that is ACCESSIBLE to their new personal circumstances undoubtedly improves the value of their apartment and their quality of life.
L'Eixample de Mar's apartments not only anticipate what the future user might want, but also what he or she will need when looking for better housing solutions that guarantee their comfort and safety.
L'Eixample de Mar's apartments should allow us to adapt our home to life's diverse situations without involving a large expenditure, a period of inconveniences due to the progress of the building work, etc. Moving to another home should only be induced by the personal decision to change residence, and not by the inability to adapt a certain home to different needs.
Making a home ACCESSIBLE is, in many cases, a difficult and costly process. This is the result of continuing to design without taking into account the user's needs when using a product. So we come to the conclusion that future housing must be conceived as a home for life, a versatile home, understood as one that allows for spatial transformation depending on the user's needs throughout his or her life (changes in age, culture, family structure, etc.).
In order to achieve this, many of our apartments offer new 21st-century architecture dimensions. If a wheelchair (1,20 m x 0,70 m) can go through, everyone can surely go through with greater convenience and comfort.
An example of this kind of intervention was implemented in Barcelona's Olympic Village. During the Games, it was also the Paralympic Village, but today many of its residents and/or visitors aren't aware of this circumstance because its design standardized it for everyone's customary use, with the advantage of having incorporated unnoticed accessibility in homes that are for life.
Garraf Mediterània has committed itself to its apartments' accessibility and in order to achieve this, has relied on the technical advice of architect Enrique Rovier-Beleta i Cuyás, an expert in accessibility.
Even so, it wasn't possible for all of L'Eixample de Mar's housing to comply with all accessibility characteristics, and therefore we have classified our apartments according to their degree of accessibility and given them a differential code.
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Accessible apartment classification:
 Adapted apartment: one that meets functional and size requirements that guarantee its autonomous, comfortable use by people with reduced mobility or any other limitation, in accordance with current accessibility regulations.
 Practicable apartment: one that, although it doesn't meet all the abovementioned requirements, can still be used autonomously by people with reduced mobility or any other limitation, in accordance with current accessibility regulations.
 Visitable apartment : one that, although it doesn't meet all the abovementioned requirements, can still be used, in isolated cases (or for visits), autonomously or with minimum aid from third parties, by people with reduced mobility or any other limitation.
 Convertible apartment: one that with simple, minor, low-cost interventions that won't affect its essential composition, can be made accessible, in accordance with current accessibility regulations.
 Non-adapted apartment: one that doesn't allow people with reduced mobility or any other limitation to use it, neither autonomously or with minimum aid from third parties. |
