

(Sabadell, 1972)
In the historic center of Gratallops, a municipality of Tarragona province, amid narrow streets and houses between party walls, a winery with a built area of 1,289 square meters adapts to its L-shaped plot. With walls as thick as 1.75 meters at most,
The house sits on a site with a deep slope covered with trees and undergrowth. The project is set out to build without harming the place, so the house sits on a rock platform which is also used as an exit and garden. Both architects and developers ag
The house was for a young couple without children, with some conventional programmatic needs (a garage, three bedrooms, a study, etc.). The triangular plot of some 400 m² was part of a subsidized land promotion. In the process, the client’s requireme
The school is located in the urban center of Sabadell, at a corner where two buildings aligned with the street create a wide courtyard with a sports hall inside the block. The project intervenes only in the oldest building (1959), housing the prescho
Not so many jobs begin like this one, with an owners’ list of wishes and hopes for their new home. A list much closer to the principles and values architects usually work with, often secretly, than the ordinary expectations of those couples facing th
Three starting points: understanding the historic value of Lleialtat Santsenca (1928), an old working class cooperative in the Sants neighborhood; knowing to the detail the building’s (physical) state to maintain as much as possible; and being sensit
Located in a residential complex of L’Escala, the house goes up on a rectangular-shaped plot with a gentle topography, facing north-south and without preexisting conditions, neither vegetation nor built elements. The program was simple, a second resi
On a plot without salient features, the project took as starting point the restrictions marked by the geotechnical study, which showed that the first meters underground had a low resistance capacity. To avoid a deep foundation, not recommendable for
The stone wall that marked out the boundaries of the estate went around the whole site, revealing just the tops of the trees inside. The materiality and the irregularity of the geometry of the wall endowed it with a special character and presence, bu
Located in the UAB campus in Cerdanyola del Vallès, the ICTA-ICP building is a research center in environmental science and paleontology. In tune with its function, from the beginning the building was designed according to sustainability criteria. Th
Flanked by party walls on a lot that stretches deep inward from the front border, this house is composed of a succession of volumes that have been deliberately set back to obtain the best possible light and views, and are arranged amid small courtyar
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
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
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