In March 2006, the Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda y el Suelo de Madrid (EMVS) launched a restricted competition for architectural ideas as a first step towards the construction of a "demonstrator" building, in the context of the strategy set out by the Manubuild Integrated R&D&I Project, with funding from the European Commission through the 6th Framework Program.

The objective of this competition, in which different European teams participated, was to obtain high-level architectural proposals for new building types - in the field of Mediterranean climatology and culture - with the application of industrialized, open and sustainable construction systems, so that the selected ideas would constitute the conceptual starting point for the building that the EMVS planned to build in Madrid as a research demonstrator.

The proposal aims to overcome the inertia that has traditionally weighed down construction in Spain. This model has been determined lately by a comfortable quantitative development based on opportunistic real estate development, with the result that our way of growing has been the most unsustainable in the European Union. However, the most worrying thing is that, together with this economic situation, the now chronic problem of the lack of specialization of the sector, which is overly dependent on a low-skilled workforce, makes it almost impossible to consolidate any culture of innovation.