The central nave of the Sagrada Família hosted on Saturday evening the conference Architectural dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity, a meeting that brought together some of the most relevant names in contemporary architecture within the framework of Barcelona's designation as World Capital of Architecture.  The event was attended by RCR Arquitectes, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta and Rafael Aranda, winners of the Pritzker Prize in 2017, and by the Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, Pritzker Prize winner in 2010. The different interventions offered a shared reflection on the relationship between Antoni Gaudí's architecture and contemporaneity, the cultural value of architecture and its capacity to respond to the challenges of today's society.The day began with the presentation and welcome from Joan Trias de Bes, a doctor architect and member of the Sagrada Família board, and with an introduction by the basilica's director architect, Jordi Faulí, who gave a brief explanation of the nave and the Nativity façade.

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.

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.

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.

On the Parisian Île Seguin, cars gave way to culture. Renault built its last cars on this island in the Seine in 1992. The factory was demolished twenty years ago, and since then the island has become a new urban center for Paris with culture as its protagonist. One of the first major works carried out there was an auditorium by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, and this evening it was announced that the art center designed by the RCR studio, called Le Large, will open its doors on October 17. Furthermore, the art center is part of a cultural macrocomplex also designed by Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta, which includes one of the largest cinemas in Paris, with 8 rooms, one of which is IMAX, and over 16,000 m² of offices and spaces for companies and cultural industries.

The architectural transformation of Olot's old town is unstoppable. "There had been so many plans that the residents were tired and wanted action," says architect Eduard Callís, the founder with Guillem Moliner of the studio Un Parell d'Arquitectes. This studio is responsible for a major recent project, the Pla de places i placetes of Olot. This Saturday, Callís guided the public through these works during a visit organized by the Group of Architects for the Defense and Intervention in Architectural Heritage (AADIPA) of the College of Architects of Catalonia. The most recent of these works are the Jardins de la Muralla, the result of injecting life into "a kind of empty space" that emerged from the demolition of a residential building about twenty years ago. "There were only two rows of plane trees and a esplanade, and the residents were very interested in transforming the place into a garden, and in this garden connecting the city with the river," says the architect. The inauguration is scheduled for May 8.

The architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta, known as RCR, won their first competition in the Canary Islands shortly after graduating from the Vallès School of Architecture. The project was for a lighthouse at Punta de la Aldea, on the west coast of Gran Canaria, and the Olot-based team submitted an exceptional proposal: instead of a tower, they designed a horizontal structure reminiscent of an outstretched hand, with the lighthouse beam at its end. Thanks to the structure's integration into the site, RCR, who won the competition in 2017, were able to create a unique and beautiful lighthouse. the Pritzker PrizeThe architects, considered the Nobel Prize of architecture, managed to achieve the same height for the light as if they had designed a tower lower down. The lighthouse was never built, but it remains an emblem of how, at the start of projects, the RCR (Royal Council of Rectors) take nothing for granted, as can be seen in the exhibition dedicated to them by the Garrotxa Museum from this Saturday until August 9th, entitled RCR Architects: Roots and Wings. A journey from the beginning to the present.This is one of the most ambitious exhibitions of his career, which will reach its fortieth year next year, and has the added value that some of his works engage in dialogue with the paintings and sculptures in the museum's permanent collection.

The interpretation of the site is one of the essential elements of the architecture of Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta (RCR). These architects from Olot have often worked in the Garrotxa landscape and have also demonstrated their talent for doing so in cities. In their most recent work, La Parada, the innovative residence they designed in Manresa for the Ampans Foundation, the building clearly improves the site, originally a "nondescript" plot on the outskirts of Manresa, as Pigem says. This residual site was only distinguished by its rather elongated shape, measuring 150 x 45 m, and the RCR have made it their own with a stepped building that has the vocation of a landscape, where the boundaries between the public space and the residence's garden are blurred.