Coming together in Barcelona

Our studio is the outcome of a shared journey between a studying, working and living couple. It started at the Barcelona School of Architecture, between holiday trips, deadlines and parties. It continued in London, working as architects for David Chipperfield Architects, where we shared friendship with talented colleagues from all across Europe. Our return to Barcelona in 2017 coincided with teaching, research and professional opportunities which resulted in the beginning of our practice. After a few competition losses, we eventually won a large public housing and facilities competition in Barcelona a couple of years ago, which will start soon on site!

Blurring the lines

We are based in Poblenou, a former industrial quarter of Barcelona; however, we cannot say that we work just there: In addition to site visits and meetings, we are both teaching design studios at ETSAB and ETSALS, schools of Architecture in Barcelona; and, for better or worse, we also have a small office space at home, where we work over the evenings, weekends and undertake doctoral research. Our work discussions continue at home, whilst we can discuss grocery supply between meetings in the office. In other words, in our everyday life there is not a clear distinction between the professional and domestic realms. In Marxist terminology we could say that our productive and reproductive worlds have blurred again, like in precapitalist times. And, as it couldn’t be otherwise, we are writing this on a Sunday afternoon, typing on our laptop from the sofa.

A sense of collaboration

Our office is located in a former industrial neighbourhood, in a beautiful brick building which was erected in 1923 as a flour factory. We are lucky to share a very generous space, under the large timber trusses of the pitched roof, with other small design studios. Coming from different disciplines, we not only share the space, but interests and concerns; we expand our constrained fields learning from and giving each other a hand when needed. This sense of collaboration and joining forces is rooted in our everyday work: most of the projects we are working on, are the result of temporary associations with other small or medium size studios.

From antithetical margins

We intend to underpin the continuity of our small practice, with a small team we trust, which is crucial for us. We value specificity towards physical, cultural, temporal and even virtual contexts; a certain process of drawing the story from scratch each time, which is perhaps not very productive or easily systematized; a process that requires us to be there in every step of each project. It is precisely the modest scale of the practice which makes this possible. Along with the studio, we intend to keep approaching architecture from antithetical and changing margins. Through teaching, research, curatorship and writing we try to find a certain critical distance from the everyday rush of the studio.