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.

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.

Friction often arises in the relationship between the Sagrada Família and its surroundings, especially due to the overwhelming influx of tourists, who encroach on the spaces of the neighborhood's residents. Would converting the future entrance through the Gloria façade into a forest help redirect the relationship between the two? This is the proposal that architect José de Villar is presenting as the tutor for one of the groups in the latest edition of the summer workshops on architecture, landscape, and photography organized by the RCR studio in Olot from July 4 to 19. With this proposal, nature becomes "the mediator" between the basilica and the city. De Villar makes this concrete by introducing its surroundings into a more natural topography. "It's about achieving urban comfort by applying how a forest works," says the architect.