Urbanitree   Spain   ‘Terraces for Life’ was the scheme that won the bid for 40 social housing units promoted by the Institut Municipal de l’Habitatge of Barcelona (IMHAB) at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. For this project in the Sant Martí district, in the Verneda

Garcés - de Seta - Bonet | arquitectes Marvel   Spain   Catalunya Media City is emerging as a hub for production, research, and training in the audiovisual, digital, and video-game sectors. This ambitious initiative is articulated in two principal operations: renovation of the historic Sant Adrià del Besó

Aramé Studio   Spain   The partitions of an apartment traversed by a narrow corridor were eliminated to reveal the concrete structure in all its glory and harness it as a new organizing element. The bedrooms and the bathrooms are grouped in a compact band to ensure a fluid

MACH   Spain   Prioritizing the entrance of daylight into a narrow but very deep apartment, a central core of services and storage makes it possible to place all the main rooms flush with the facade. The wall that separated the living room from the kitchen was remo

h3o architects   Spain   The renovation of an old barn puts in partitions of angular lines that result in a changing visual impression, an effect reinforced by a palette of finishes rendered in electric color tones. A family legend, according to which lightning slipped throu

Lacol   Spain   Over and above the neighborhood’s street-level shops, the dwellings are organized around a courtyard and a staircase that has landings thanks to the existence of an alternative passageway along the outside. By means of a large ceiling fan, the heat t

Lacol   Spain   Soaring prices determined the choice of the usual concrete structure, the basic unidirectional scheme of which proved ideal for establishing an efficient arrangement of twelve living units and shared facilities and amenities provided on the ground fl

Lacol Laboqueria Taller d’Arquitectura   Spain   A large foyer gives access to the dwellings and a multipurpose hall that doubles as a dining room and, at the request of the residents, can be used separately to connect with the area’s fabric of community associations. Harnessed for acoustic filteri

Harquitectes   Spain   Integrated into the landscape of Pals, a municipality of the comarca of Baix Empordà, in Catalonia, this house rises over the remains of an old farmhouse named Mas Geli, of which only two facades with buttresses and a pair of spaces with stone vaults

Nordest arquitectura   Spain   The project takes off from the idea of building two homes for a family in Rupiá, a municipality in the Baix Empordà region of Girona province. Combining bioclimatic, functional, and integration arguments, the intervention analyzes the relationship be

dataAE Xavier Vendrell   Spain   At the foot of the Collserola mountain range, in the Barcelona municipality of Sant Just Desvern, this social housing development presents continuous terraces on all its facades, which widen at the corners to form spaces in direct contact with the li

Jaime Prous Architects Pineda Monedero   Spain   These semi-detached houses are located in a neighborhood on the outskirts of a town near the city of Girona. Each dwelling faces two opposite sides and is joined back-to-back to its partner, in the manner of Janus the two-faced god. The union comes a

Nua arquitectures   Spain   Located at the highest point of an agricultural property given over to the growing of olive and almond trees, near the Monastery of Santes Creus in Tarragona province’s comarca of Alt Camp, a small stone shelter is part of an ensemble of isolated roo

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   For the purpose of mitigating its visual impact, a building raised in the historical quarter of the town maintains the scale of neighboring constructions and uses traditional materials. Connected by an open gallery, two volumes are composed in terrac

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   An open block presents a low volume and a tower connected by a bioclimatic atrium thanks to which all the apartment units, meant to be rented out, face two directions. The artisanal bricks baked with biomass provide inertia to the inner void – which

Arquitecturia Josep Camps Olga Felip   Spain   An abandoned house integrated into its environs has been refurbished by occupying the ruin and expanding a series of interwoven interior spaces and gardens. Generating a counterpoint with the tower of the neighboring house, the stone, mud, and concre

Nua arquitectures   Spain   Initially conceived as a house on a podium, to which floors were added with the aim of accommodating a hotel, the building was turned into a geriatric residence, and then abandoned for thirteen years. The original idea of the project involved demolit

CRÜ   Spain   A clean-up of the rear brick wall revealed the word .lavadero, the place having been one of the public laundry spaces built in Barcelona during the 19th and part of the 20th centuries, at the intersections of the torrents flowing down from the Collse

Harquitectes   Spain   In Gavá, a municipality in Barcelona province, in the comarca of Bajo Llobregat, this residential complex takes the form of three stepped volumes to adapt to the natural slopes of the terrain. With a built area of 16,509 square meters, the project se

BAAS Arquitectura   Spain   Located at Carrer de Pallars 180, in Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood, the project sought to give the block a sense of continuity and engage with preexisting elements. A work of BAAS, a Catalan firm led by Jordi Badía, the office building presents a

Carles Enrich   Spain   The Rec Comtal is one of the most important hydraulic infrastructures of Barcelona, having suppled the city with water and irrigated the territory of the Besós agricultural basin from the 10th century to the mid-20th. Because of urban growth, a large

Harquitectes   Spain   The Sabadell-based studio Harquitectes has transformed an old industrial building located in Esplugues de Llobregat into the corporate headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Galenicum. With a new envelope that provides better insulation to cool t

Ágora arquitectura   Spain   In the comarca of Baix Llobregat, specifically in the Barcelona municipality of Sant Vicenç dels Horts, stands this house on a plot delimited by an openwork brick wall. On the pilastered base of the same material, which contains the clayey earth

Josep Maria Montaner   Zaida Muxí   The cooperative that calls itself Lacol came into being in 2009 as an initiative of young architects and students averse as much to the usual logic of hierarchical study programs as to professional exploitation. It was also a bit more than ten years

The deep-rooted association culture of Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood revealed to a group of young professionals setting up an office there what would become the foundation of their practice: the idea that architecture is less about projects per se t

Alejandro Valdivieso   The anthropologist Marvin Harris stressed in his book Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999) how much postmodernity had done to make science and reason – associated with the pressure and oppression of totalitarian regimes – give way to emotio

Josep Maria Montaner   With his multifaceted work, which went far beyond the confines of construction, the eminent architect became one of the leading figures of the Renaixença.

The youngest generations of architects have demonstrated that Catalan architecture can well pursue courses deviating from the cosmopolitanism of disseny and Barcelona. It is true that the teaching and practice of the profession in Catalonia has to a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Tying up the histories of Catalonia and Scotland from the 15th century to the present, John Elliott has written a book that is both topical and timeless. It is comparative history in the most genuine way – like his studies of Richelieu and Olivares o

Iñaki Ábalos   Harquitectes is a collective that represents well a way of doing in today’s context. A small collective with a clear focus on an issue at once broad and narrow, and that we could sum up in two words: matter and air. Their work includes an interesting

Cristina Pardal   Ignacio Paricio   A well-known Barcelona architect, when introducing Harquitectes during a recent seminar, referred to the new aesthetic proposed by “that school of Vallès.” That “vallesana” imagery is not coincidental, but in fact emerges from an approximation to for

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The work of Harquitectes encourages to propose a new version of the Vitruvian triad. Instead of the Latin terms that have carved in stone the message of the Augustan architect, a carefree formulation in plain language: appropriate, attractive, afford

Defining features of young Catalan architecture include a toned down air, the small scale, a penchant for working with the preexisting, and an aesthetic strong in materials and sustainability. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture is moving from bling to bareness. The economic devastation left by the crisis and the symbolic decay of emblematic works have favored the rise of a new attitude. In contrast to the dazzling glare of the architectures of social-opulence –

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The book by Juan Benet is already fifty years old. A half-century has passed  during which the nation Spain has gone from bimillenial to bicentennial and ended up a mythical space not unlike the novelist’s Región or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Myt

Oriol Bohigas   Founder of Grupo R and part of a generation marked by the Spanish Civil War, Sostres remained committed to the principles of modernity.

El País   Luis Fernández-Galiano   Why do the best architects build for the worst regimes? This is the question that Richard Lacayo raises in Foreign Policy. Illustrating his article with works of Norman Foster and Rem Kool-haas in Russia and China, the critic of Time magazine br

Magda Anglès   A diferencia de la pintura, las obras arquitectónicas aún no han llegado a la época de su reproductibilidad técnica, aunque quizás poco les falte. Hasta que ese día llegue, todavía hay que desplazarse y peregrinar hasta lugares concretos para conocer

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The promise and the risk of global culture have been expressed in Spain through three cosmopolitan feasts and a parochial funeral. The inauguration of the Domus in La Coruña, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the metro of Bilbao contras

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The elections in Catalonia choose not only individuals, but also ideas about regional planning, town development and urban design.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Siza, Meier y Gehry construyen en España tres nuevos museos que expresan una voluntad de legitimación simbólica a través de las instituciones del arte de vanguardia. 

Josep Muntañola   Such was Oscar Tusquets’s comment on the news that his housing project at Fukuoka was the favorite of Japanese housewives —even above those of the country’s own architects—, and it has become a slogan of his attitudes toward design and architecture.

Juli Capella   Quim Larrea   Of all the facets of the figure of Oscar Tusquets, the most attractive one may well be his very personality. Charming, self-centered and unique, the personage he has decided to represent provokes corrosive envies and heated criticisms. Great connoiss

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Al fifty, Oscar Tusquets has the retina of an old man and the reflexes of an adolescent; in the contrast between elderly sight and young muscle lie both his weakness and his genius. His visual culture is sparkling and panoramic: the product of a pupi

Félix de Azúa   Basta con hacer un poco de turismo para comprobarlo: la destrucción de la costa levantina y catalana no es sólo consecuencia de la barbarie y la explotación de guante blanco, es también un expolio que sólo puede darse allí donde apenas hay resistenci

Josep Maria Montaner   Los inicios Lógicamente, los inicios de la preocupación por la búsqueda de una arquitectura nacional entre los arquitectos catalanes se producirán como efecto de las corrientes romanticistas y nacionalistas definidas por el pensamiento alemán, que re

John H. Elliott   Union & Desunion

Enric Granell Antoni Ramon   1874-1962

Maurici Pla   1880-2007