The book ‘Habitar la norma. Proyecto de vivienda y sistemas normativos’ (Inhabiting Norms. Housing Design and Normative Systems) analyses the relationship between housing design strategies and the regulatory systems that affect the design processes in residential architecture. The book, written by Associate Professor Fernando Nieto, has been published within the book collection Colección Textos de Arquitectura y Diseño by the Argentina-based publisher Nobuko/Diseño Editorial, one of the most prestigious publishers of books of architecture and design in the Spanish-speaking community. The book is distributed in Spain and Latin America, and can be bought in several online platforms, as well as an e-book from the publisher’s online library.
The goal of this book is to bring together the theory and practice of housing design from the study of the relationships between its modes of regulation and contemporary lifestyles. The focus is on social housing and the main analysis tool is the architectural project. Based on a methodological approach that links normative and domestic systems, the definition of some strategies for coding and upgrading the quality of domestic space is developed in parallel with the review of aspects such as the one-to-one association between spaces and functions or the regulation of housing based on square meters or number of rooms. The alternatives proposed from the housing project are accompanied by a terminological update, which seeks to broaden, by redefining it, the spectrum that goes from the individual to the collective spheres based on the triple scale of the domestic unit, the building as support and the city as the main context of collective housing.