In cultural terms, architectural activity involves permanent revising, updating, and redescribing, and the fresh look offered by this presentation of Jaume Bach’s fifty-year practice demonstrates this. Leading the renewal of programs, types, and lexicons that took place with the arrival of democracy in the 1970s, the work of the Catalan architect – solo, in partnership with Gabriel Mora, and in his current phase at the helm of Bach Architectes – is revisited with the help of his son Eugeni’s photographic eye. This personal revision shows how the marks of time and ‘signs of living’ (quoting the Smithsons) are what root architectural works to a time, a place, and a set of users.

The book’s post-production approach is reinforced with essays by members of today’s Mediterranean scene, who tackle the redescription from the lens of concerns and values of the moment, while Juhani Pallasmaa and Rafael Moneo give the continuity necessary for Jaume Bach’s long career to be understood.

The book conveys a positive sense of nostalgia for a bygone Barcelona, from the gauche divine – the cultural episode that coincided with the professional consolidation of Bach’s generation – to the Olympic city, which signaled an unrepeatable inflection point. Nostalgia too for the figure of the cultured professional architect devoid of the heroic or messianic. With natural sophistication but no shams or excesses, aware of his role in civil society as an intellectual technician, he is an architect of the kind we now need.