If most houses are designed—and in detail—before being inhabited, this one is being designed while living and working in it. We are located in an old warehouse between party walls in Reus, an old lighting workshop that the founding architects of the Pigaa studio, Sílvia González Porqueres and Andreu Pont Aineto, bought without many resources and which they have gradually made their own. They have transformed it, but first they got to know it, occupied it, and put it to the test. And they are still not finished.

The architect Carmen Torres (Barcelona, 1986) –founder of the studio Sarquella Torres together with Pau Sarquella– does justice to the idea expressed by Josep Pla that in the ultra-local lies the universal. Specifically, Torres began with the international part: she started her studies at the Barcelona School of Architecture (Etsab), and continued her training at the ENSA-Paris Malaquais school. Thus, her professional career began in the French capital, as a collaborator in various studios on public equipment and housing projects. And from the French capital, Torres and Sarquella moved to Bangkok to work as professors in the International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA) at Chulalongkorn University.

At first glance, Casa Boratuna does not attract attention or compete with the landscape. It is not its intention, and for that very reason, for this discretion, it calls out. In the Vall de Llémena, in Gironès, the dwelling designed by architect Victor Bouman has a domestic and recognizable form: a compact volume, a gabled roof, and earthy finishes; it could pass for just another house in the area. It is a conscious decision. The surprise comes when you enter: this house, which is contained from the outside, opens generously towards the valley on the inside.

Anouk Hoffmann-Morin (Berlin, 1996) describes herself like this, laughing. “I’m an architect without a degree and an illustrator without training, but I do both things,” she explains. Hoffmann-Morin has completed a degree in Architecture at the University of Montreal and Philosophy at the University of Quebec. And, even though she doesn’t have the qualifying architect’s degree or formal training in the art world, this hasn’t stopped her from creating a comic book about architecture.

A good way to grieve is to gather memories. When, a few months ago, my father, an architect, died, rummaging through documents, I learned that the lineage of architects who preceded him was much more extensive – and notable – than was said at home.The lineage has ended (for now). None of the seven siblings have dedicated themselves to architecture. The industrial engineers lineage on my mother's side (Cornet) has also become extinct, one of whom directed the Maquinista Terrestre i Marítima.Among the buildings preserved from the lineage of architects of my father, Vil·la Urània stands out, the work of my great-grandfather Magí Rius (grandfather of my grandfather, Magí Romaní Rius). Magí Rius Mulet built it when he was thirty years old. He had not yet reached his professional peak.Vil·la Urània is one of the oldest and most beautiful houses in the Barcelona neighborhood of Farró. It is single-story and slightly elevated (to access it, you have to climb eight steps), which gives it a temple-like air. It has a few ornamental details in the neoclassical style. It was built in 1868 – the year of the Glorious Revolution–, precisely the date on which Josep Comas i Solà was born: I will tell you about it now. The house was commissioned to Magí Rius, Comas i Solà's father, but he lived there for a short time because he died young. His son, the astronomer, inherited it and named it Vil·la Urània, in honor of the muse of astronomy. He lived there until his death, in 1937.I visit Vil·la Urània accompanied by Ricard Martínez, a great astronomy enthusiast, who presided over Aster, Barcelona Astronomical Association, for a few years. "As a child, Comas i Solà already looked at the sky. His hobby became his profession. He did good work on the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars (he thought he had observed a volcanic eruption on Mars; we now know it was a dust storm). He had an enormous capacity for work. He took many photographs, and where photography couldn't reach, he made drawings," says Ricard. And he adds, with a smile: "There are astronomers who have been terrible drawers"."He was very keen on looking through the telescope from the roof of this house, where he spent hours and hours. He made several discoveries: eleven asteroids – including Hispània – two comets...", details Ricard, while we have a coffee at Vil·la Urània. It is now a café-restaurant. "He had a great capacity for communication. He gave many lectures and often appeared on the radio. Before graduating in physical-mathematical sciences, he was already collaborating with La Vanguardia –l’ARA did not exist yet–. He wrote for the Godó newspaper regularly throughout his life. He also published articles in numerous foreign magazines. And he promoted the so-called Festes del Sol (Sun Festivals), which have been revived at Vil·la Urània."

Terraced houses, the most traditional ones, the ones we find in most towns and old city neighborhoods, are usually positioned in the same way. They tend to have a narrow facade facing the street, a succession of rooms, and at the end, a patio or small garden. Casa 1902, designed by the Ofici: arquitectura studio, in Badalona, begins where others end. Here, before reaching the front door, a patio has been created that must be crossed.

La Pedrera: night and day

Besides the Sagrada Família, Casa Milà is, possibly, Gaudí's most emblematic work. In this building, the architect explored the limits of architecture to create a unique residential building. It was the last house Gaudí built and, therefore, it is probably the most unique and personal, as it brings together all the research he did around architecture and art over the years. If you want to escape the heat, you can visit it by taking advantage of the La Pedrera Night Experience, an opportunity to tour the most emblematic spaces of the building with a guided tour that reveals Gaudí's most intimate essence. The visit culminates on the rooftop, with a videomapping show in which images, light, and sound merge with the building's shapes. A very special visit that you will end by having a glass of cava under the stars. And if you're more of an early riser, you can sign up for the La Pedrera Sunrise experience, an opportunity to enjoy the house in peace, just before it opens its doors to the public.

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The real estate agent, who was a friend of theirs, had already warned them: "The problem with this house is that if you go to see it, you'll fall in love with it." And so it was. They tried to calculate how much the renovation of this gem might cost, but it was totally impossible to make even a minimal estimate. And, since you can't fight love, they bought it.

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"How has the Catalan character influenced the country's architecture?", asks architect Joan Roig in front of a good twenty subscribers of ARA, members of the Club Prèmium, at the entrance of the exhibition "Seny i rauxa. Notícia de l’arquitectura catalana" (Sense and passion. News of Catalan architecture), which takes place at Disseny Hub Barcelona until the beginning of September. It is precisely the dichotomy "seny i rauxa" (sense and passion), prudence and passion, that defines Catalans, which also defines Catalan architecture, in the opinion of Joan Roig, curator of the exhibition, together with Victòria Garriga and Carme Ribas."Seny i rauxa. Notícia de l’arquitectura catalana" reviews the last 150 years of Catalan architecture, since the founding of the School of Architecture until today, through a wide variety of pieces, both architectural material – sketches, plans, models and photographs – and artistic and design works – paintings, sculptures and furniture – with an innovative approach that links the artistic and architectural legacy with expressive movements and social dynamics. All of this is not exhibited chronologically or by style. And what order does it have? Go see it! In addition, one of the attractions is that there is a lot of "unpublished" material, which was kept and is very difficult to show.

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Houses built or renovated with wood, earth, straw, or a wide variety of biological materials are proliferating in the Girona regions thanks to a unique ecosystem in Catalonia that brings together dissemination and training entities, architects, surveyors, and all kinds of sustainable construction professionals. It is a very well-connected network that helps, among many other things, to train self-builders, share experiences, resolve doubts, obtain labor, and find natural materials with a zero (or negative) carbon footprint.

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Perhaps you will read this on your way to the beach, or sunbathing on the sand. For me, the beach transports me to childhood; that's why I like it so much. I learned French at El Golfet, making friends with the grandchildren of my grandparents' friends. My grandmother loved to practice the language on the sand and looked for any excuse to socialize with French retirees rather than Catalans. I believe she always thought that France was a civilized country, a refuge to escape to if the dictatorship returned. Walking down the coastal path, looking for shellfish on the rocks, and jumping over the waves before retracing the uphill path was my life. Now I go there to play paddleball, to read, or simply to listen to the waves so I don't hear anything else.For urban planners, the beach is a magical place. In the city it is very difficult, and it is becoming increasingly difficult, to mix people. Everyone tends to move where they feel comfortable with their tribe, and with the polarization between the rich and the rest of urbanites, urban boundaries are expanding. But the beach is different, and that fascinates me.Each beach is a world. I choose them according to how much I want to keep my distance. In Castelldefels and Gavà, you can sit by the sea, on a kind of natural step carved by the waves, which allows you to place the book on your lap and read without back pain, while you dip your feet in the salty foam. In Barceloneta or Vila Olímpica, you can get there by metro, which is a luxury within reach of very few seaside environments. In Maresme, you can travel along the beaches by train, with no more interference than a nautical club or a beach bar. And in the coves of Empordà, you can sacrifice towel space for a rocky scenery, with steep reds and green pine forests, which invite you to swim along the rocks without losing proximity to the mainland. You can be packed in like anchovies, but you go into the water and you can see fish and seaweed with cheap glasses.

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Just this Wednesday I was talking at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion with Pol Esteve and Marina Povedano, both architects and thinkers, gathered around the project Plou prou?, an activation of the well-known building that collects and reuses rainwater to transform it into a habitable fountain on Montjuïc: a place to enter, stay, share, and generate community. The installation, conceived by Cierto Estudio, HRO Architects, and Metrònom, aims to raise questions about the origin of water, the hidden infrastructures that bring it to us, and the need to rethink its management beyond its immediate use and daily convenience: the idea is to make visible the volume of water that evaporates from the pavilion's pool — in which, you will recall, the mayoral candidates dipped their feet in the 2019 campaign — through tanks that refill the disappeared water with phreatic water volume. Talking with Pol and Marina, beyond rambling about the poeticity of gesture and the performative nature of contemporary art, I discovered that, when it was conceived, the Mies pond could have been full of life (microbes, water lilies), but that modern architecture, towards the end of the fifties, turned it into the most significant monument of the era and a visual icon, according to Povedano, detached from "its material, environmental, and temporal conditions", and "turned into a pure, autonomous, and immutable object". Today it is still this kind of museographical mummy, and the pond, a mirror in which it can be reflected: a surface that doubles its beauty, but denies life. It turns out that in 2021, the architects explained, Andrés Jaque proposed an intervention, Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society, in which he showed the public the hidden materials that allowed the pavilion to be maintained in those conditions of conservation and control: the architect dismantled the building's basement and revealed the ghost that maintains, for example, the crystalline water without a single alga. In a way, it revealed that form had won over substance. After the conversation, a little disoriented (a writer among architects trying to save the type by talking to them about the poems of rain and water by Verdaguer and Carner), I thought about all the places in the city that, like the pavilion, have this cosmetic thing that pushes life away: Plaça dels Àngels, les Rambles, Plaça Universitat... and each person could go on listing places according to their daily routes. Some will speak of Plaça dels Països Catalans, in Sants, or Plaça de Lesseps, in Gràcia; and we could write a very long list, but that's not the point now, but rather to understand that what these places have in common is that they have become spaces that, like Mies's pond, reflect their own image and little else. And that, little by little, or more quickly, in some cases, they have displaced life from places where, initially, the idea was that there would be life. Perhaps that's why they have become mere transit zones, in the best of cases, or reliquary monuments where one only goes to pilgrimage. What is most frightening, however, is how these places will continue to transform with new challenges such as, as we see now, impractical summers: elderly people no longer sitting in the cool of the benches, children no longer playing ball under the scorching sun, neighbors no longer meeting. Where will the old be accompanied? Where will the children play, what will their summers be like? And who will we end up talking to when returning from shopping, or on the way to the market, if someone brings the shopping home to us, avoiding the streets? They are naive questions, I know, but no less urgent for that. Perhaps someone like Andrés Jaque should exhibit the hidden, subterranean mechanisms that shape the city this way, and that life is evicted from the spaces where it was expected. Or, on second thought, we have it all in front of us and it is we who do not want to look. 

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The so-called society post (post-Fordist, post-industrial, postmodern, post-analog and, also, post-COVID) in which we live, confronts us as individuals continuously with ambiguity, the new defining substance of the character of urban life in the 21st century.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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