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

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

Lluís Jubert - Taller d’Arquitectura Ferran Pelegrina i Associats    Spain   The project is located in La Joncosa del Montmell, in the comarca of Baix Penedés, where the old vineyards come together on the interior slopes of the massif that lends its name to the municipality. At the end of a pleasant promenade from the town c

Vivas Arquitectos Pau Vidal   Spain   Located in the Marina del Prat Vermell neighborhood, this complex contains 32 apartments and spaces for collective use by the Llar Jove Marina Prat Vermel SCCL cooperative. Barcelona City Hall has ceded the site to it for 75 years minimum. The to-be-

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The project consists of 85 social housingunits on a plot previously occupied by the emblematic Cinema Pisa in the city of Cornellà de Llobregat. It is a five-story freestanding building with a wood structure, resting on a ground level with a concrete

Josep Ferrando Architecture Pedro García Hernández Mar Puig de la Bellacasa Manel Casellas   Spain   The town of Moià, some 60 kilometers north of Barcelona, needed to urgently renew its fire station, so in 2016 it called a competition which asked for an industrialized structure that could be built faster. The winning project proposed a light struct

Mesura   Spain   “Una casa come me” was the instruction that Curzio Malaparte gave Adalberto Libera when he contracted him to build the villa in Capri that Brigitte Bardot would immortalize walking down its stepped roof, wrapped in a bathrobe, in the Godard film. Equ

PMMT Arquitectes   Spain   In the wake of research conducted in collaboration with Catalonia’s health system, the Barcelona firm PMMT was commissioned to design a prototype to be built close to hospitals as reinforcement for the regional medical network, in response to the pan

Carles Enrich   Spain   The old church of Santa Eulàlia in Gironella was built in the mid-14th century and since then it has been repurposed several times. In 1907 the building acquired a civil use and suffered a series of alterations derived from its different activities –

Twobo arquitectura Luis Twose   Spain   The town of Vilajuïga is in a privileged location, between Serra de Verdera and Cap de Creus natural park, and is well connected to the rest of the region. With a population slightly over 1,000 inhabitants, Vilajuïga has a long food and wine traditio

Vicente Guallart   Spain   The project involved renovating two constructions raised late in the 19th century in the Rec neighborhood of Igualada, near Barcelona, that contained a small textile factory and a residence. The area, once industrial, is undergoing an urban transform

Josep M. Julià i Capdevila   Spain   Since its birth in 1878, the Can Batlló compound and La Bordeta quarter share a long history of growth and transformation with Barcelona. The city’s industrial heyday saw the complex expand and new buildings rise. Over time, however, these fell into

Carles Enrich   Spain   The Barcelona practice of Carles Enrich undertook the restoration of one of the two faces of the defense tower at the castle of Merola, the only remnants of the 13th-century construction in Puig-reig, a municipality of the comarca of Berguedà. The 20

Ágora arquitectura   Spain   The Barcelona firm Ágora – set up in 2014 by Joan Casals Pañella and José Luis Cisneros – built this hut on a small plot in a camping area of the Catalan Pyrenees, at the confluence of the rivers Durán and Segre and the road that connects Bellver de

Flores & Prats   Spain   The building had gone through many different stages –construction as a workers’ cooperative in 1924, renovation in 1954, abandonment in the 1980s and 1990s, okupa center – and each of them had left a mark. The intervention to create a new dramaturgy

Arquitectura-G   Spain   The flow of stairs and stacked rooms shows on the outside as a series of elongated openings that have the effect of reinforcing the vertical character of the preexisting domestic tower. 

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

Juan Antonio Solans   Los cambios ocurridos en los órganos de gestión de la política de vivienda en España con la reordenación autonómica han de traducirse en la arquitectura, y ello sin que se dé desde su inicio una búsqueda expresa de una arquitectura nacional. En Catal

John H. Elliott   Union & Desunion

Enric Granell Antoni Ramon   1874-1962

Maurici Pla   1880-2007