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.

"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 In addition, one of the attractions is that there is a lot of "unpublished" material, which was kept and is very difficult to show.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.