Marquet, Unzurranzaga, and Zulaica invited the architect to join their team in working on the project to be carried out on the site of the Urumea jai alai court in San Sebastián. This means that when Rafael Moneo joined his colleagues of that city, the first plans and an initial allocation of apartments to the members of the cooperative had already taken place. A new proposal – emphasizing the project’s undeniable lure – required persuading the members of the cooperative to accept a totally different building from the one initially agreed on. The architects believed that only with this change would justice be done to the site’s prime location. The architects’ efforts to defend their new proposal, now an anecdote of the past, is a clear example of their firm belief in the need to carefully consider the close relationship between housing and the city. The Urumea building constituted a new type of residential block in which stairs and lifts alternated to give a sense of strict continuity to the apartments. This was an improvement on more traditional residential blocks in which only the facades unify the building, its units – built on sites that could be considered independent from one another – grouped according to conventional symmetrical patterns. The Urumea project offers a unifying solution to residential blocks in that the exterior regularity occurs on account of the continuity and indivisibility of the floor plans, and not as a result of a process of aggregation. Notwithstanding, this typology does not prevent the facade from showing the different sizes of the apartments, and an ability to blend into the surrounding blocks by highlighting singular elements. (Rafael Moneo)