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.

When the commission to organise, complete and furnish one floor of the Architects’ Association building was undertaken, the space was already largely finished in terms of structure, windows and external enclosures, parapet finishes, flooring, suspended ceilings, and air-conditioning and electrical installations. The departments to be accommodated were those corresponding to the plan approval (‘visat) and administration sections, a basic and fundamental unit in the functioning of the Association, since it is here that the inspection and certification of projects is carried out, which essentially constitutes the institution’s core activity. In the preliminary design competitions for the building, the programme established for these sections was as follows: Plan Approval: waiting and submission area, office of the Duty Board Member, office of the Head of Plan Approval, general office, archive and records. Administration: offices of the Treasurer and the Accountant, cashier’s desk, accounting office, and document collection area. From the time of the competition call to the moment of this commission, the requirements of these sections had increased extraordinarily, particularly in terms of office capacity and the number of architects responsible for plan approval. From the first sketches it became clear that the available space was very insufficient and that, in order to function effectively —as was appropriate given the importance of the section— an additional floor would be required. Several consultations were held with the Building Committee, and it was ultimately agreed to limit the intervention to the available floor and instead eliminate the waiting room, the office of the Duty Board Member and that of the Accountant, while enlarging the general lobby as much as possible, with the potential use of the stair landing. It was also suggested that the Association Club could be used as an extension of the waiting area for the plan approval section, although the drawback of its lack of proximity was immediately apparent —a problem that, given the advanced stage of construction, could no longer be effectively addressed. In accordance with the programme, two somewhat independent units were established: plan approval and administration. The former was structured according to the strict sequence of document processing: document submission counter – entry registration – auxiliary plan-approval staff – archive and metal filing cabinets – architects responsible for plan approval – cashier – document collection counter. At the centre of this unit is the isolated office of the Head Architect, the only space with direct access from the lobby, in order to facilitate personal consultations. In this respect, and in line with a general criterion for organising the work of this section, direct contact between the public and the architects personally carrying out the plan approval process was deliberately avoided. The second unit consists of the general administration office, which is connected to the Treasurer’s office, the other of the only two rooms with direct access from the lobby. The two units are separated by the staff entrance corridor, which also serves as the zone through which the lobby connects visually with the exterior—that is, with views towards the Roman towers and the neo-Gothic façade of the Cathedral. Given the constraints of the available space, consideration was given, as mentioned, to enlarging the lobby by incorporating the stair landing. While this solution made it possible to create an area for the review and preparation of documents by members, it also implied the impossibility of fully isolating the office complex—outside public service hours—from the vertical circulation routes leading to that landing, namely the staircase and lifts. The Building Committee pointed out the disadvantages of this situation and the need to establish an effective enclosure. With this criterion in mind, an intermediate solution was adopted, consisting of encroaching upon the landing only with solid elements, thus providing a fixed enclosure, and separating the remaining free area by means of a simple glass partition without mullions or transoms, incorporating a “Securit” glass door. This solution at least ensured visual continuity between the two spaces, even though they could not be physically unified. The furniture was arranged in such a way as to reinforce this perception while also allowing some effective use of the landing. For this reason, two identical benches were placed, one on each side of the aforementioned glass partition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.