RCR Arquitectes   United Arab Emirates   A collaboration between the Catalonia-based firm RCR Arquitectes and the property developer Muraba, the Veil residential skyscraper – 380 meters tall – stands next to Dubai’s main transport artery, Shekh Zayed Road. The slender 73-story tower contain

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   As a result of the close collaboration between the architects and the owners – the Suqué-Mateu family –, the project to build the new winery, by fields of vineyards and a country estate, started to take shape a decade ago. The relationship with the l

RCR Arquitectes   Portugal   On the premise of fusing architecture with the landscape in the city of Lagos, in Portugal’s Algarve region, RCR arquitectes – Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta – designed this construction for the Palmares golf resort, with the restaurant Al

RCR Arquitectes   Portugal   This project by the Catalan firm RCR – Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramón Vilalta – seeks to blend the architecture with the landscape through interiors and exteriors that blur its limits, adapting to the topography of the site in Lagos, in southe

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   Located at the bend of a road that joins Camprodón with Olot, the town of La Canya is growing in the form of residential developments similar to those around large cities. However, its location in a rural region has permitted a comfortable combinatio

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   In a sports complex in Taradell, a small town in the province of Barcelona, the site of this indoor swimming pool and the precipitous terrain determine its configuration, articulated in four parts: the outdoor tracks, the wall, the services building,

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The studio of RCR Arquitectes in Olot, Gerona, has been under transformation over more than one decade. In 2004 the architects bought the old Barberí foundry building, then in ruins, with the objective of transforming it gradually into a workspace th

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The buried building is organized around a large dome that stands out in the vineyard landscape. This system suggests a gradual growth, which allows the building to acquire a smaller scale than the required one, and to be enlarged if necessary...

RCR Arquitectes   France   The new art Center La Cuisine is a unique space for encounter that takes gastronomy, conceived as an integral activity linked to the territory and to the agricultural and livestock activities, as starting point for artistic creation. The castle of Nè

RCR Arquitectes   France   The museum dedicated to the artist Pierre Soulages in?Rodez, his home town, is in the very central Foirail park: an almond-shape public space, a few meters from the old city and from the square of the Gothic cathedral, the most important building of

RCR Arquitectes   Belgium   La topografía de Flandes se caracteriza, como la del resto de Bélgica, por la ausencia casi total de accidentes geográficos, lo que convierte al país en una gran planicie. Cerca de Hofheide, este vasto paisaje forma una cuenca pantanosa, siendo en es

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   Besalú, a town of rich medieval history, is approximately 25 kilometers from Olot, between the Fluviá and the Capellades rivers. The site for the nursery is on the border between the town and the countryside, separated by a filter of PVC cylinders of

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   If the Les Cols restaurant showed how the interior of a farmhouse could be transformed with steel and glass, the project to build five pavilions for evening rest intends, through the use of pure forms, to achieve the superposition of textures and abs

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The main objective of this house, lying on the hillside of one of the volcanoes of Olot, is to offer its tenants good views and, at the same time, obtain as much surface on ground floor as possible and as much garden space as possible. To achieve th

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The project stems from the desire to build a swimming pool in a markedly rural context, on a site where different types of traditional structures – a farm, granaries and a mill – stand side by side. The specific characteristics of the place end up t

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   An old and walled in farmhouse was the place chosen for a new restaurant, with a design that combines metaphors of the rural and the culinary world. Three warehouses placed along a basilica-type floor plan have undergone a meticulous refurbishment, b

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The house offers the opportunity to recover the dry pond of an old mill located on the outskirts of Llagostera, a few kilometers from the coastal town of Sant Feliu de Guíxols. The location of the new construction, along the water’s edge, determines

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   A small detour from the road that links the centers of Olot and Gerona, at the height of Montagut, goes up by the foothills of the mountain until it reaches a haphazard series of constructions. Among these – in most cases recently built single-family

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   Located on the edge of a slope, the house, 1.5 meters below the top level of the field, wishes to provide spaces that protect the tenants’ independence and also their life in common, keeping a balance with the constant presence of nature. Its strateg

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The urban park of La Arboleda (meaning grove) is in the west access to the town of Begur, on the coast of Gerona. Once a natural space with a stream and a wooded area next to the town, this zone now acts as a hinge between the new expanded areas and

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   In the Volcanic Natural Park of La Garrotxa, in Les Preses, near Olot, there is a unique place: a sea of rocks that is the product of the basaltic mass of the Croscat volcano and the result of man’s hard struggle to own a piece of land to harvest. A

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The campus of Montilivi, south of the historic center of Gerona, imposes the rationality of its grid on a landscape of gently rolling hills and wooded masses. Starting from one of the plots thus defined, the new Law School is inserted with the intent

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The high-school is located on the fringes of the coastal town of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, some one hundred kilometers north of Barcelona. The peripheral context, still changing, suggested an introverted, self-absorbed solution. Two parallel branches, o

On view up to 11 September at VETA, the Madrid art gallery of Fer Francés, is a journey through eleven projects of RCR Arquitectes. They are presented by means of 160 works on paper, some in large format. The exhibition also presents the renovation o

Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta of the firm RCR have been made foreign members of France’s Académie d’Architecture, founded in 1840 as the Société Centrale des Architectes primarily to promote architectural quality. RCR in 2015 received

RCR Arquitectos The trend that the Pritzker Prize seemed to have adopted in its latest editions with laureates like Alejandro Aravena or Shigeru Ban did not seem to point in the direction of RCR Arquitectes, a trio whose radical architecture at first

El País   Luis Fernández-Galiano   Land architecture, but also architecture of the land. After three decades of work, Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta have obtained universal recognition for a stubbornly local oeuvre: the most media-savvy award of them all has distinguish

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta combines romantic rauxa with rational rigor. Based in Olot, the capital of La Garrotxa – a Pre-Pyrenean region in Catalonia, filled with extinct volcanoes and pleasant landscapes that h

The direction that the Pritzker Prize seemed to have marked by honoring the likes of Alejandro Aravena and Shigeru Ban in the last cycles gave no inkling that this year’s winner would be RCR, a trio whose radical architecture, a priori, does not tall

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Any description of the bright and dark work of RCR must resort to oxymoron. One may use geometric landscapes, weightless gravity or – as their projects were presented here in 2010 – rigorous romanticism: these antithetic terms express the tension bet

Carlos Jiménez   Aranda Pigem Vilalta – RCR Arquitectes – are magicians of mineral and natural discoveries. Their architecture conjures sensual intimations, refractions, and densities from the most elemental material conditions, whether a single sheet of Cor-ten stee

Richard Ingersoll   They did not gag or blind-fold me, but for two days I was a guest of a group of architectural extremists, in the lost horizon of Olot. This small city rests amid the remains of a few extinct volcanoes at the foot of the Pyrenees between Catalonia and

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of RCR (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta) combines romantic rauxa with rational rigor. Based in Olot, the capital of La Garrotxa – a Pre-Pyrenean region in Catalonia, filled with extinct volcanoes and pleasant landscapes

Anatxu Zabalbeascoa   Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem y Ramón Vilalta son tres chicos de Olot criados en el campo que, tras estudiar arquitectura, peregrinaron hasta la obra de los maestros modernos en Norteamérica y Japón. Aquel periplo no fue un viaje de iniciación. Fue un e

The Vallés architecture school brought together the Catalans Rafael Aranda (1961), Carme Pigem (1962) and Ramón Vilalta (1960), three 1987 graduates who, withdrawn from the Olympic impulse that boosted the careers of their Barcelona colleagues, have

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Madrid  2017   - 240 Pages 

William Curtis   Between Abstraction and Nature