Finca Roja

This guide to Finca Roja in Valencia opens with a question: how many of the three hundred seventy-eight families behind its doors spent their evenings not indoors, but in one shared garden built just for them. It follows architect Enrique Viedma Vidal, who won a 1929 competition to design affordable housing for the city's workers and clerks, and his decision to turn the whole block inward around a single interior courtyard instead of lining flats along a street. Along the way you will hear how neighbors nicknamed the complex the beehive house, casa colmena, and filled its courtyard with a fountain, shops and a bakery. Stand in that courtyard and picture the games children once ran between its covered passages.