If you grew up in the Barcelona of the 90s you may have heard at some point the term “cheap houses” as an indeterminate place in the periphery and whose name was already imposing. If, on the other hand, that was your house, you have known since you were a child something that architecture intellectuals have taken a whole century to discover: that these houses have the same value as icons of Barcelona such as La Pedrera or Casa Batlló.
This has now been pointed out by the Iconic House network , which has included the Casas Baratas del Bon Pastor in its prestigious list of buildings, which also includes some of Gaudí’s jewels.
Iconic House is an organization that selects 20th century homes and studios that stand out for their architectural value and function as museums.
With this incorporation, the cheap houses of Bon Pastor join the list of 198 houses around the world that are part of this network, among which already include in Barcelona the Pedrera (Casa Milà), the visitable floor of the Casa Bloc and the Casa Moratiel. This recognition underlines the historical and architectural importance of these modest dwellings built in 1929 in response to the need for affordable housing for the city’s working classes.
The museum of cheap houses
The MUHBA Bon Pastor opened its doors in March 2023 with the aim of preserving and disseminating the history of housing in Barcelona throughout the 20th century. To this end, an island of these emblematic cheap houses was rehabilitated, musealizing them to show the evolution of the neighborhood and the lifestyles of its inhabitants from 1929 to 2017.
Inside the houses, visitors can tour an exhibition that reflects the daily life of the residents over nearly a century, with architectural details and objects that transport them to different eras.
The Casas Baratas were a housing solution created to accommodate part of the large wave of workers from southern Spain who came to build the facilities for the 1929 Universal Exposition. For a long time they were stigmatized (Bon Pastor was, at that time, a piece of land far away from the most urbanized areas of Barcelona) despite being homes with quite acceptable conditions compared to other solutions, such as the vertical shantytown that took in the residents of settlements like Somorrostro, which were implemented later on.
That stigma led them to be out of the heritage panorama of the city, but in recent years the claim of the periphery has put them back on the map, and the precariousness of housing conditions in the city make see these houses, small individual low houses with their own courtyard located in pedestrian streets, as a small luxury that many would sign right now in the city.