I celebrate that the Congress of Architecture has once again put housing at the center: “We declare that housing is a right, not a mere economic return. This right is non-negotiable”,says the Barcelona Declaration. It is an ambitious slogan, because houses are very valuable spaces, it is difficult to be able to pay for them with the effort of work, they consume many resources and their production is central to urban economies. Housing has become a luxury because cities have discarded other ways of planning, building and living.The congress has featured the participation of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who are probably the European architects who have done the most, throughout their careers, to demonstrate that inhabiting is not only a right, but that it should be a pleasure. And this may cost not much more. It is not a matter of means, nor of BIM software, nor of material execution price. It has to do with the ambition to offer the best spaces in the neighborhoods where we intervene, and it requires observing, designing, and taking risks.I had Jean-Philippe Vassal as a professor for a year when I went on Erasmus to the School of Architecture in Versailles, and I have a clear and fond memory of him: I never heard him pontificate, what he taught was a reasoning very close to what he built and what he has been building for the last twenty years. Vassal's course was initially disconcerting because it didn't ask for a specific solution for a given plot. During the first classes, he simply suggested that we students go around the city taking photographs of curious spaces, with unforeseen uses. When you are given so much freedom, it becomes very difficult to stand in front of a classroom and explain a personal discovery. Then we would conceptually travel to Africa, to the desert, or to Djema-el-Fnaa square in Marrakech, to understand what makes a space comfortable without anyone having applied a design or an imitated style. Finally, the course project consisted of proposing a place and intervening in it to improve it. It was difficult, but he did with us what he proposed in his office: intervening without the safety net provided by regulations and ordinances. Opening our gaze allows us to discover trees that create cathedral-like spaces, simply with a cadence between the trunks and selective pruning of branches. Or, as they have done with exquisite precision, converting greenhouses into fantastic and economical homes.

At Ses Clotades, in Formentera, architects Marià Castelló and Lorena Ruzafa turn architecture into an extension of the landscape. Built on the isthmus that connects La Mola with the rest of the island, in a territory shaped over centuries by the movement of dunes and where small sandy hills, the 'clots', pine forests and ancient cultivated fields draw a changing terrain, the house embraces this entire natural environment without trying to tame it. More than occupying the place, it has found its place there.

New public housing developments and greener, more accessible streets designed for pedestrians. Also, facilities that recover heritage and reconnect neighborhoods. Around the Llobregat and Besòs rivers, riparian areas that are being renaturalized to gain biodiversity and resilience. These are some of the actions with which the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) is shaping the metropolis of the future: a network of projects that not only build or renovate, but also adapt the territory to an increasingly demanding urban context.

The concrete used by the Romans two thousand years ago has always fascinated science, as it allowed an architectural revolution with which buildings, bridges, and aqueducts were erected, which still survive. The scientific journal Science Advances from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has prepared a report highlighting the role of the long and progressive carbonation of minerals. The study suggests that for years it has been believed that the resistance of Roman material was caused by the mixture of volcanic ash and lime they used. The opus caementicium did contain this mixture. However, the research published in the North American journal concludes that the differentiating factor is calcium carbonate. This chemical compound, otherwise called calcite, is the predominant binding component in the remains analyzed in the report.

Budget, time, knowledge, and experience. This is the blend that has made the Perelada winery possible, a RCR project that 22,000 people visit each year. It cost 47 million euros and took 20 years to complete. "A winery that will not go out of fashion," says Perelada's oenologist Delfí Sanahuja, who has been present in each phase of the winery's construction, inaugurated in 2022. "I knew zero about architecture, and they knew zero about wine. Now I could be an RCR intern after two decades with them," the oenologist jokes, "we understood each other very well," he affirms.

Summer has arrived in La Garrotxa: the gold of the harvested fields and the green of the forests coexist on the route between Olot and La Vall de Bianya, on the way to La Vila, the estate where Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta, the RCR, are building their dream place, a pioneering research center on space. More specifically, as they themselves have reflected, it is "a living and thinking space to transmit new awareness directly and concretely through nature and architecture". "This is an exceptional project: we are used to working on commission, and here what we want is to build an idea," says Ramon Vilalta, on the way. The RCR set out to make the dream of La Vila a reality after winning the Pritzker Prize in 2017, the Nobel of architects. They already knew it because they had built a small pond for the previous owner, but when they acquired it, they conceived a much more ambitious project, where they want to bring together, in addition to architects, artists, thinkers, scientists, musicians, engineers, philosophers, psychologists, designers, filmmakers, students, and entrepreneurs, to "highlight hybridization". "We have always thought that culture is the most precious value we have as a country," says Vilalta. "In Catalonia there are very creative people, but we don't know each other, we don't connect. Just by making it possible for people to meet transversally, the La Vila project would already give a lot," he emphasizes.

Our interview takes place in Olot’s old Barberí foundry, converted into the studio and beating heart of RCR Arquitectes. Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta discuss returning to Olot, the decision to always work together, landscape as an ally, the Pritzker Prize as freedom and responsibility, and their Vila as a cultural and life project.

These days Barcelona is full of architects from all over the world. Tomorrow, the congress of the International Union of Architects opens at the Tres Xemeneies in Sant Adrià, which over the course of this week will debate the great challenges and unknowns facing the profession. Just like thirty years ago, when there was also a world congress of architects that almost died of success – sessions had to be held at the Palau Sant Jordi – the expectation is high, although it is expected that, at least in the organizational sphere, the spaces will be adapted to the needs. What is curious is that the debate topics have not changed much, even if it seems so from the language used, but the context is very different.

For a long time, housing has become one of the country's main challenges. Often, however, the debate is reduced to figures. Those that refer to how many apartments need to be built. Those that tell us about the increase in the price per square meter, whether for purchase or rent. Even those that talk about how many more people can live in a specific place. There is also an approach to the issue from another perspective. What are these homes like? Have they changed much compared to how they were built twenty years ago? What should the buildings of the future be like?

In Girona, near the border between the neighborhoods of Can Gibert del Pla and Santa Eugènia, a very unique apartment block stands out, surrounded by a tree-lined park. It is a building made entirely of wood, with checkered and symmetrical shapes, featuring two forty-meter facades and open galleries on each of its six floors. The block, inaugurated in 2022, is called 6x6 and is the work of the Girona-based studio Bosch Capdeferro, which has received numerous awards for the project's sustainability and energy efficiency values.

This Sunday, the World Architecture Congress begins in Barcelona, which will bring together architects and students from all over the world in the city to debate the future of the discipline.

The last weeks of the school year have been intense for the first-year ESO students at Institut Teresa Pàmies (Barcelona), who have managed to complete the co-creation project of a public-use plot of land on which they had been working all year. They did so within the framework of the workshop Architecture and senses, a plot for everyone, one of the 400 architecture workshops that 130 architects have taught in 25 educational centers in the province of Barcelona between May and June, coinciding with Architecture Week. Although this year the workshops are part of the program for Barcelona 2026, World Capital of Architecture, the initiative is not new, as the College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC) has been organizing it since 2019. Over these eight years, more than 55,000 primary, secondary, and high school students from more than 200 educational centers have participated.

They sat down in front of the enormous window, in the only two armchairs in the room. Two white leather and wood armchairs, matching the footrest. The views were spectacular. They had recently moved into the house of their dreams. A moving company took care of everything. In fact, with the move they took the opportunity to clean up and get rid of weight, both physically and emotionally. Neither travel guides nor dictionaries made sense, everything was already on the internet; nor were the books they had already read. Nor the CDs. Suddenly, no dust, no silverfish, no mold. They would live in a space of glass, wood, and concrete. Energy efficiency A.

On a plot between party walls in Sabadell, only six meters wide and very deep, a family has found a way of living that has little to do with excesses and much to do with daily well-being. The house, with 210 square meters over two floors, does not seek to impress. Their idea of luxury is that natural light reigns, that there is cross-ventilation, that silence dominates, and that a tree is present in most rooms.

Continuing with my last article, where I argued that Francoism had dire consequences for our cities, I would like to address the poisoned legacy of the mismanagement of power structures, which reacted late and poorly to the miseries of the post-war period, to the drought in the fields, and to the exodus of thousands of people from the countryside to the cities. It is often argued that Franco built many infrastructures (dams, highways, housing). He was also the driving force behind desarrollismo, with serious setbacks in urban planning. What we do not know is what kind of city we would have if the Republic had won. Surely we would now have decent public housing and neighborhoods with a better balance between housing and services, with schools, health centers, and more generous cultural spaces. But since we cannot invent history, I can only imagine. What we do know is that beyond the large estates driven by public bodies such as the Obra Sindical del Hogar or the Municipal Housing Trust, there are only four large private development estates, such as Bellvitge, Ciutat Meridiana, the Ciutat Cooperativa of Sant Boi, and the Santa Elvira neighborhood in Montcada, which have serious deficiencies in services and facilities. In the sixties and seventies, growth was poorly managed, without thought. Where there were garden cities, suburban areas were allowed to grow, as in the case of Calafell, Platja d’Aro, Roses, and Maresme. On the coast, genuine atrocities were permitted due to tourist pressure, such as in Lloret and Riells. And on old rows of houses, blocks were allowed to grow without any integration into the environment. The public sector forgot the constitutional mandate to redistribute part of the increase in value generated by urban transformation so that it would benefit the community, and often promoters were allowed to cede margins or edges of the land as impossible green areas, while the obligation to urbanize streets was ignored.

Can Gabriel is a house that explains how it is made. Also how the building in the historic center of Palma where it is located is made. The radical intervention carried out by the architects of TEd’A, the team led by Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez, is explained through an architecture that turns construction processes into part of the daily experience of living. This is a work that claims the beauty of bare materials, of joints, of seams, of textures, and of visible imperfections. And it shows that, sometimes, a good way to transform a space is to start by leaving it to the bones. This project has become one of the most celebrated works of recent Spanish architecture: awarded at the XVII Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, distinguished with an award by La Casa de la Arquitectura, finalist of the FAD 2025 awards, and selected for the Mies van der Rohe awards.

Amidst the tourist monoculture of Cadaqués, Teresa Madrid and Pau López row against the current, with their sights set on the resilience of the ancestors who inhabited Cap de Creus. Almost a decade ago, they began managing different olive groves to make oil and to manage a flock of guirra sheep, from the area, to preserve soil fertility and clear the dry stone walls that they work manually. From Mas de la Senyora, they reclaim two of the fundamental pillars of Cadaqués' historical identity: agriculture and livestock farming. But also understood as a way of caring for the soil, building landscape, and creating community and culture beyond tourism and environmental protection.

There are houses that are born from a dream and others that are born from a problem. Can Pizzeta has a bit of a dream, but above all it has a lot of having to overcome real difficulties. In fact, it started with a geometry as real as it was impossible: a triangular plot, narrow and sloped, wedged between the street, a neighboring property, and a stream, on the edge of the Collserola Natural Park. The project did not disguise the constraints, but rather turned them into the very shape of the house. That's why it's triangular, almost like a slice of pizza. And that's why the name suits it so well.

New construction single-family homes, renovations and refurbishments in small towns in Empordà, near the Costa Brava. Mostly second homes for families from Barcelona. In keeping with the surroundings and made with local materials. This would be the most representative example of the award-winning architecture currently being produced in the Girona region. This is determined by the projects selected in the latest editions of the Girona Region Architecture Awards, organized by the Girona delegation of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC).

Annalisa Massaro