How to get there
About
In this first stage, the catalogue focuses on the modern and contemporary architecture designed and built between 1832 –year of construction of the first industrial chimney in Barcelona that we establish as the beginning of modernity– until today.
The project is born to make the architecture more accessible both to professionals and to the citizens through a website that is going to be updated and extended. Contemporary works of greater general interest will be incorporated, always with a necessary historical perspective, while gradually adding works from our past, with the ambitious objective of understanding a greater documented period.
The collection feeds from multiple sources, mainly from the generosity of architectural and photographic studios, as well as the large amount of excellent historical and reference editorial projects, such as architectural guides, magazines, monographs and other publications. It also takes into consideration all the reference sources from the various branches and associated entities with the COAC and other collaborating entities related to the architectural and design fields, in its maximum spectrum.
Special mention should be made of the incorporation of vast documentation from the COAC Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.
The rigour and criteria for selection of the works has been stablished by a Documental Commission, formed by the COAC’s Culture Spokesperson, the director of the COAC Historical Archive, the directors of the COAC Digital Archive, and professionals and other external experts from all the territorial sections that look after to offer a transversal view of the current and past architectural landscape around the territory.
The determination of this project is to become the largest digital collection about Catalan architecture; a key tool of exemplar information and documentation about architecture, which turns into a local and international referent, for the way to explain and show the architectural heritage of a territory.
About us
Project by: 
Created by: 
Directors:
2019-2023 Aureli Mora i Omar OrnaqueDocumental Commission:
2019-2023 Ramon Faura Carolina B. Garcia Francesc Rafat Antoni López Daufí Joan Falgueras Anton Pàmies Mercè Bosch Josep Ferrando Fernando Marzá Aureli Mora Omar OrnaqueExternal Collaborators:
2019-2023 Lluis Andreu Sergi Ballester Helena Cepeda Inès Martinel Maria Jesús QuinteroWith the support of:
Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de CulturaCollaborating Entities:
ArquinFADFundació Mies van der Rohe
Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico
Arxiu Mas
Basílica de la Sagrada Família
Museu del Disseny de Barcelona
EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona
Suggestion box
Request the image
We kindly invite you to help us improve the dissemination of Catalan architecture through this space. Here you can propose works and provide or amend information on authors, photographers and their work, along with adding comments. The Documentary Commission will analyze all data. Please do only fill in the fields you deem necessary to add or amend the information.
The Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya is one of the most important documentation centers in Europe, which houses the professional collections of more than 180 architects whose work is fundamental to understanding the history of Catalan architecture. By filling this form, you can request digital copies of the documents for which the Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya manages the exploitation of the author's rights, as well as those in the public domain. Once the application has been made, the Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya will send you an approximate budget, which varies in terms of each use and purpose.
Memory
The project was the winner of a competition in which the challenge of erecting a building with modern technologies in the Ciutat Vella district, with the proximity of the cathedral and the old Roman wall, was laid out. The winning solution chooses to clearly differentiate a low body, adjusted to the street alignments, and a tower configured independently, with a rectangular plant. The lower body corresponds to the auditorium and is directly linked to the entrance hall through an intermediate mezzanine located above the exhibition hall, on the ground floor. Thus, the building has four levels (the basement, the ground floor, the attic and the function room) that give representative qualities to the part of the building linked to the street, while the tower rises as a series of independent trays, with a vertical communications core (elevator and staircase) located at the rear of the site.
This project is located on a trapezoidal site and must give an appropriate response to the location, since it is located in the same square that serves as an access to the cathedral, but must also become a clear exponent of international modern architecture. The building is divided into two clearly differentiated volumes: the lower one redraws the perimeter of the medieval urban fabric and respects the system of urban spaces, while the tower stands back as far as possible from the square so as not to attack the environment with new forms and materials. The lower volume contains the activities open to the public and the tower the offices.
The path of the lower body occurs in a spiral, through a completely open staircase and is a continuation of the street. From the cooperative you go up to the bar and from the bar to the ground floor, with a completely glass façade. Finally, you reach the auditorium, with a reinforced concrete frieze that supports some of Picasso's sgraffito. The tower is designed as a container for services to the collegiate. Each floor was designed by a different architect, although none of the original interiors are currently preserved.
Authors
On the Map
Constellation
Cronology (25)
-
Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)
The project was the winner of a competition in which the challenge of erecting a building with modern technologies in the Ciutat Vella district, with the proximity of the cathedral and the old Roman wall, was laid out. The winning solution chooses to clearly differentiate a low body, adjusted to the street alignments, and a tower configured independently, with a rectangular plant. The lower body corresponds to the auditorium and is directly linked to the entrance hall through an intermediate mezzanine located above the exhibition hall, on the ground floor. Thus, the building has four levels (the basement, the ground floor, the attic and the function room) that give representative qualities to the part of the building linked to the street, while the tower rises as a series of independent trays, with a vertical communications core (elevator and staircase) located at the rear of the site. -
FAD Award
Finalist. Category: Interior Design
Publications and Building Information Office Floor of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)FAD Award
Award-Winner / Winner. Category: Interior DesignSecretariat Floor of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)FAD Award
Finalist. Category: ArchitectureArchitects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)'ÒRIM, otro' Joan Miró's Exhibition and Mural at the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)
Studio PER, Pep Bonet Bertran, Cristian Cirici i Alomar, Lluís Clotet i Ballús, Oscar Tusquets Blanca
It was the end of 1968 when the partner architects of Studio PER (Pep Bonet, Cristian Cirici, Lluís Clotet and Oscar Tusquets), who had just turned twenty-seven, received a commission from the College of Architects of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands to write and edit a counter-exhibition at the school headquarters - which we titled Orim, otro (Miró written backwards) - of the anthological exhibition organised by Barcelona City Council in the Gothic part of the old Hospital de la Santa Creu. Despite the difficulties that the dictatorship of General Franco posed for opening up abroad, we felt very close to the events of May 1968 in Paris. Barcelona was, at that time, a more cosmopolitan city than it is now, because it is still a city in which its tourist success is diluting its personality. We keep an indelible memory of those months in which we were working on the project, advised by Joan Brossa, Alexandre Cirici, Pere Portabella, Joan Prats and Antoni Tàpies, and especially of the relationship with Joan Miró. During a dinner at the Reno, we presented our script to Joan Miró, asked him for an artistic intervention on the glass around the ground floor of the school and set a date to visit his studio in Mallorca and choose some original paintings that should be part of the exhibition. Oscar Tusquets and I went to Miró's studio. His house was pretty kitsch. A fishbowl on a kind of inner parterre was the most memorable architectural element of the living room, where we waited for him to come down from his bedroom. He apologized, saying that it was his wife Pilar’s territory, who chose his architect brother to carry out the project. He immediately led us to his studio, a building of great architectural quality and very much lived by Miró, full of his work in progress, clippings from magazines and newspapers and various objects of primitive African art. We were very impressed with the paintings he was working on. Our script proposed dividing the exhibition into two well-differentiated spaces, separated by the staircase that leads to the so-called Picasso Room and which we proposed to close laterally and above as if it were a steep tunnel. The lower space would be dedicated to Miró’s work from before the Civil War; and the space above, to post-war works. The stairwell between the two spaces would signify the dark times of the war, and a film that we commissioned to Pere Portabella would be shown. We designed the different nooks and crannies to put the paintings and objects in the exhibition, with the materials of the formwork that the construction company that we most appreciated in those days, and which has unfortunately disappeared from the market, selflessly provided us: Famadas, SA. In terms of content, although Miró, Prats and Tàpies offered us original works from their private collections, we only used the works that had the most didactic possibilities and a more contentious attitude. We were not interested in the great works; they could already be seen in the great exhibition of the Hospital de la Santa Creu. A large part of our exhibition consisted of a selection of enlarged photographs of fragments of paintings in which Miró’s symbolism was present, such as the female sex represented by genitalia or chaplains passing through the ring, as can be seen in the engravings of the Barcelona series. But our script also included asking Joan Miró to do some work on the glass that surrounds the ground floor of the headquarters of the College of Architects, in Nova Square. We imagined that, at best, he would paint his signature, but his enthusiastic response was to paint a mural in four colours and black. Each of the screenwriters was assigned a colour and he chose black, applied to the broom and to correct what we had to paint moments before. It was, in large dimensions, the same attitude that led Miró, in the last stage of his life as an artist, to paint on anonymous paintings that he bought in provincial exhibitions.Historical Archive of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)
Studio PER, Pep Bonet Bertran, Cristian Cirici i Alomar
Our intention in this project was to make the equivalent of a Coca-Cola delivery truck in architecture: a container that is easy to identify and cleans up the chaos of a pile of boxes with bottles of different sizes, from the average to the family size. The space defined by the COACB building, enclosed by a curtain wall, in which the Historical Archive was to be installed, and our inability to design in a short time, and for a few units, filing cabinets for plans, pages, cards and slides as economic and effective as those of the market were essential at the time of making a decision. We will further explain both concepts. The location of a building with a curtain wall on an open floor was responsible for the position of the entire archive in the centre of the enclosure, with the peripheral circulations so as not to contradict a type of façade designed to free it from furniture. The curtain wall. The curtain wall of the existing façade was also responsible for raising the pavement to correct the defects of the building, which has a sill that is too high. On a more anecdotal level, it has been responsible for the dark tone of our intervention in contrast to the bright white of the pre-existing environment, as well as of the carpet that covers the new part in contrast to the existing parquet. After this project, and making a certain generalisation of our experience, we risk making the statement that the curtain wall has many possibilities in an office building. Recognising our inability to design and produce effective filing cabinets manually (by effective we understand that the drawers open and close smoothly), which were also transportable and at the same time could be expanded if the file grew, but without having to resort to the architects and artisans who had built them, we chose to select the set of filing cabinets that, in our opinion, were the best designed. We would like to point out that not even the most powerful manufacturers of office furniture have bothered to coordinate the sizes between filing cabinets intended for different uses, nor do the handles of all of them respond to the same design criteria. Our decision of using industrially produced file cabinets responds to an attitude in which we are particularly interested, because we believe it responds to a very simple case of what are the most important commissions in interior architecture. How can you design a supermarket without thinking that one of those huge fridges should be used for frozen products, cheese or milk? How can a bar be designed without thinking that inside there will be an Italian coffee machine full of fluorescent plastics, and without thinking that the owner will soon install a couple of jukeboxes between the tables? How is it possible to think about the design of an office if we forget that its image will be partly made up of filing cabinets, typewriters and Coca-Cola refrigerators? The result of this attitude is a certain visual chaos of filing cabinets of different sizes and with different handle systems. A chaos that we try to organise with the use of a single dark colour for all types of file cabinets and the introduction of cylindrical wooden shelves and supports that, solving the functional problem of work surfaces for those who work in the historical archive, introduce a visual order. Just as the neat pilasters of the Palazzo Taruffi maintain the monumentality of a building with asymmetrically arranged openings, the wooden cylinders in the corners of the Historical Archive are visually important enough to admit a certain chaos in the design and layout of the filing cabinets. To reassure functionalists, we will say that the function of these columns is to solve the problem of the corners that file cabinet manufacturers have not solved.FAD Award
Award-Winner / Winner. Category: Interior DesignHistorical Archive of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)FAD Award
Finalist. Category: Interior Design - Public, Commercial and Professional InteriorsRefurbishment of the Fifth floor of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)Bach-Mora Arquitectes, Jaume Bach i Núñez, Gabriel Mora i Gramunt
Refurbishment of the Fifth floor of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)
Bach-Mora Arquitectes, Jaume Bach i Núñez, Gabriel Mora i Gramunt
The secretary’s office floor had been designed by Antoni Moragas i Gallissà. The COAC’s board considered that it had become obsolete, so they commissioned a total renovation of the floor. The new floor has been incorporated into the new lobby to make the reception space bigger and, consequently, three areas have been created: closed offices, a panoramic office and the third archive office. In the project parts of the old interior have been recovered to keep the memory of the COAC’s history.Premi Ciutat de Barcelona
Award-Winner / Winner. Category: Disseny d'Interiors
Sala Picasso i Oficina de la Vocalia de CulturaRenovation of the Façade of the College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC)
autoria desconeguda
The proposal is a reinterpretation of Xavier Busquets' original project from 1962 and is part of the legacy of modern Catalan architecture. It consists of maintaining and reinforcing what was most substantial in the original proposal, which was the tension that was established between the monumental platform of the trapezoidal lower body with the Picasso’s sgraffito and the withdrawn body of the office floors. Reinforcing the neutrality of the background, the Picasso’s base is more valued. In short, the spirit of the original project is restored by introducing some modifications such as the change in the type of opening of the windows, from the original sliding and hinges, to oscillating doors and the removal of the crowning finish of the building with a tile cladding extending the glass from the façade to the upper crown, as it already appeared in the model that Busquets had submitted to the 1958 competition. We therefore opted for being loyal to the original project instead of an alternative proposal, such as proposing a second skin or changing the cut of the curtain wall of the façade in favour of greater transparency. Efforts have been made to improve the performance of the new façade, both in the quality of the materials and construction details and in the energy efficiency of the complex. In this sense, a photovoltaic glass with CIGS technology has been incorporated into the panel of the sills, with a screen printing of small white dots so that the impact from black to gray is nuanced and it integrates better with the whole façade.Renovation of the Façade of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)
Fuses-Viader Arquitectes, Josep Fuses i Comalada, Jordi Mansilla, Jorge Perea, Joan Maria Viader i Martí
The proposal is a reinterpretation of Xavier Busquets' original project from 1962 and is part of the legacy of modern Catalan architecture. It consists of maintaining and reinforcing what was most substantial in the original proposal: the tension established between the monumental platform of the trapezoidal lower body with Picasso’s sgraffito and the retired body of the office plants. Reinforcing the neutrality of the background, the Picasso’s base is valued even more. In short, the spirit of the original project is recovered by introducing some modifications such as the change in the opening of the windows, from original sliders and hinges to oscillating doors and the removal of the crowning finish of the building with a tile cladding extending the glass from the façade to the upper crown, as already appeared in the model that Busquets had submitted to the 1958 competition. We therefore opted for a critical fidelity of the original project instead of an alternative proposal such as proposing a second skin or the change of the cut of the façade’s curtain wall in favour of greater transparency. Efforts have been made to improve the performance of the new façade both in the quality of the materials and construction details and in the energy efficiency of the complex. In this sense, a photovoltaic glass with CIGS technology has been incorporated in the panel of the sills, with a screen printing of small white dots so that the impact from black to gray is nuanced and it integrates better with the whole façade.EU Mies Award
NominatedRenovation of the Façade of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC)Fuses-Viader Arquitectes, Josep Fuses i Comalada, Jordi Mansilla, Jorge Perea, Joan Maria Viader i Martí
Related Works
Set Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC)
