The offices take up the entire top floor of a building intended for offices, with a trapezoidal plan and three façades built on the basis of a fiber cement sill, while the rest is made entirely of glass. The structure is based on metal portals. The office program to be installed on that free floor consisted of a reception, a secretary, a meeting room, a visiting room, two offices intended for technicians, an office for an administrator, a library, a draftsman's room and health services for employees and the public. An air conditioning system had to be installed for all the rooms for the summer. In the whole distribution, the existing façade was an important condition, which due to the type and dimensions of the openings, only normally allowed and in a façade perimeter of 40 metres the delivery of dividing partitions in 8 fixed points. Another condition was the pillars of the structure, which, due to their situation in the plan, made it difficult to build partitions precisely at those points where deliveries with the external enclosure were easier. The third condition was to obtain some natural lighting even for the spaces that remained inside and did not receive direct light from the outside. Using a special profile to solve the delivery of the partitions with the façade carpentry, the possible delivery points were increased; and by retracting the dividing walls forming angled windows in each displacement, it was possible to separate the structure of the partitions and give some natural lighting even to the reception, which is the innermost space of the offices. To visually isolate the offices from the outside, protect them from the summer sun, and make the installation of air conditioning as economical as possible, the entire façade has been protected with "American" type windows of white plastic, which separated in their lower part from the face of the façade, create an air chamber between the shutters and the façade, very favourable to avoid a higher heat transmission. To allow the passage of the air conditioning conductors, the false ceiling of the rooms that ventilate directly to the outside have been placed at a higher level than the rest, and between both levels the grilles of air expulsion have been placed. All the rooms in the program are closed spaces except the secretariat, which is separated from the outside only by a counter and a wardrobe hanging from the upper floor and which visually isolates both environments. All the doors, except for the sanitary ones, are of acid-treated glass to give greater illumination to the interior rooms while preserving privacy. In the partitions and during their construction, drilled metal profiles were placed that serve as supports for most of the office furniture.

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.

Our architectural proposal integrated in a single building the different types of space needed both for the integral manufacture of upholstered furniture and for the administration of the company itself and the marketing of its products. The external expression of the spatial requirements of the various activities that had to be carried out in the building is evident in the different free heights of the various sectors, as well as in the treatment of natural light based on large windows in the façade area in which the offices are located, and groups of four modular skylights to capture overhead light in the workshop area, and finally the total absence of natural light in the materials and finished product storage area. The triangular shape in plan is worth noting, with its hypotenuse aligned with the access road, as the most effective to allow the future growth of the building without having to modify its accesses, nor its façade, and not having to interrupt the activity while the hypothetical expansion works lasted. Unfortunately, a fire put an end to the building we had designed.

The house was designed as a second residence and was built on what had been the garden of a modernist house on the sea front. At the time, it was one of the first buildings in a half-developed street that was being formed at the borders of the gardens and exits of the houses on the sea front. Precisely the lack of defined environmental pre-existences, in a street that has evolved in a chaotic way in which blocks of up to seven floors are juxtaposed with single-family homes of ground floor and main floor, led us to consider the house as a construction separated from the neighbours and facing the block’s interior garden. The different spaces of the functional programme are located at different levels, which in a certain way are the landings of the scale of the vertical communication. The stairs take such a prominent place that, up to the bottom of the service staircase that goes up to the roof, it forms a complex roof of the dining room that is located below it. A few years later, we had the opportunity to grow the volume of the house, with the addition of two duplex apartments, with terraces and a swimming pool, forming a new set designed with the same formal language.

The house is accessed through the roof, which is connected to the street by a small bridge that allows the passage of vehicles. A cover protects cars parked under it from the sun and rain. The view of the house from the street is that of a large surface with rounded corners with several exempt and very light elements on it, reminiscent of a beach bar. The view of the house from the valley is a rather large white volume of about four floors high, which juts out from among a pine forest.

Thomas House’s basements were completely abandoned in early spring 1979. The façade was full of election posters and the windows were broken and full of dust. Inside, benches of machines had already been sold at the railroad; fallen railings and skylights had been completely broken or replaced by a slab of ceramic material; and there were half-demolished partitions to facilitate the filming of “The Savolta Case”. The industrial decline of Catalonia has also had its positive aspects. If the partitions, cabinets and stained glass windows in coloured leaded glass and the ceilings designed by Lluís Doménech i Montaner are still preserved, it is because the heirs of Joseph Thomas did not have enough money to replace them with “modular partitions of aluminum” and an “Armstrong” roof. In the restoration and installation works of the B.D. headquarters, on the ground floor of Thomas House, we have not mimetically repeated any broken or worn elements, we have basically cleaned it up, in the most prosaic sense of the term. We used some of the existing closet doors to close the holes in some new partitions we built to separate the warehouse from the exhibit. We changed the beginning of the staircase that connects the two floors. We have replaced an old translucent glass skylight with a new clear glass one that shows the sgraffito and stained glass in the inner courtyard. We changed the floor, which we think replaced an old skylight with a skylight like the original. We laid a carpet with our anagram as the pavement of all the areas destroyed by the benches of the machines. And to insulate ourselves from street noise and protect the stained, glass windows on the façade, we have installed a luna security that protects the outside, such as a display case, grilles and stained, glass windows. It was the detail that we cared about the most and the element that compared it to its cost that solved most problems for us. It is also the intervention that best expresses our attitude towards monuments.

This house, designed by the architect himself, is located in the vicinity of the village of Sant Antoni de Vilamajor, near the southern slopes of the Montseny massif, in a place where there is an abundance of cultivated plots and agricultural constructions. The house stands as a critique of the typology of conventional chalets and their habitual lack of adaptation to the surroundings. Taking the local landscape as a reference, the house is conceived as a henhouse open to the exterior, whose characteristics are: elementariness in the construction, integration into the staircase of the surroundings, and a concreteness given by the objectivity of the needs. The construction is carried out in parts over a long period of time, responding to the requirements that have arisen. There is a constant, however, in the consideration of climate and landscape from a mimetic attitude towards the place where it is located. This attitude can be seen in the definition of the limits of the plot and the implantation of the house: the plot has no fence, there is an access road that is surrounded only by perimeter vegetation and cultivation, imitating the agricultural constructions. In this case, a careful study of the gradation of the passage from public to private is required. This vegetation that generates perimeters has well-defined functions: defining privacy, climate control and adding to the growth factor.

This house, initially designed as a family residence, has subsequently been subjected to several extensions and the landscaping of the outdoor space that surrounds it, which were not initially contemplated in order not to exceed a limited budget. No architectural separation has been built between the area used as a private garden and the rest of the property for agricultural use. The entire programme is developed on a single T-shaped plan, with the arms oriented towards the south. The façade is protected from the summer sun by a sloped roof porch, which is the extension of the roof on two tiled slopes of the whole house. It is built based on two sheets of brick walls, the exterior has a natural colour and the interior is painted white. The tiled roof rests on wooden beams, which at the same time rest on the interior brick wall. Bathrooms and kitchens are partially covered with broken pieces of marble.

Emplaçament L’edifici es troba en el municipi d’Urús, sobre la cota 1.200 i en el marge Est de la carretera d’accés al túnel, en el punt en que hi ha les cabines de peatge. Dit d’altre manera, es troba a uns 300 metres enllà, en sentit Cerdanya, de la boca Nord del Túnel del Cadí. Programa funcional del centre de manteniment i control La part més important de l’edifici, està dedicada a facilitar el manteniment del túnel i accessos, així com les seves instal·lacions. Es tracta de: garatges per a guardar-hi els camions llevaneus, un gran magatzem per a la sal que s’utilitza per prevenir les glaçades sobre la carretera, i diferents magatzems més petits per a guardar material de reposició de ventiladors, làmpades de recanvi pels aparells d’enllumenat, i material mòbil de senyalització. Altres dependències de l’edifici, estan més lligades al control remot del que succeeix en el túnel pròpiament dit i en els seus accessos, així com a la mesura de les variables atmosfèriques, a partir de les quals es comanden automàticament les turbines destinades a renovar-ne l’aire. Finalment, també hi ha instal·lades les oficines administratives de l’empresa concessionària, i els serveis necessaris com a base operativa de peatgistes i mantenidors de les instal·lacions i de les vies de tràfic pròpiament dites. Descripció de l’edifici L'edifici s'ha projectat en el punt de trobada entre el pendent de les muntanyes que formen la Serra del Moixeró i una esplanada, formada artificialment per a ubicar-hi les cabines i barreres del peatge, de tal manera que l’edifici té una sola façana que mira envers l’esplanada, ja que la façana posterior és, de fet, un mur de contenció de la muntanya. En planta té una forma semblant a una clau de serreta, i és per això que en transcurs de la seva construcció, entre els encarregats els tècnics i la propietat, ens hi referíem com: ”La Clau". El cap circular està ocupat pels garatges, magatzems, tallers i el control. L'orifici central del cap, és un pati de maniobres pels vehicles. La part dentada està ocupada per les altres dependències citades anteriorment. El tractament formal de la coberta de l'edifici és el mateix que el de la muntanya, doncs es tracta d'una coberta plana del tipus invertit amb grava procedent de la mateixa muntanya i amb certes àrees plantades amb la mateixa vegetació de turó baix que pobla el terreny natural circumdant. Aquesta coberta camuflada, te només algunes intervencions més arquitectòniques com una claraboia continua entre el forjat i el mur de contenció del terreny i un gran lluernari centrat en l'espai d'accés a l'edifici. Els materials i les tècniques constructives L’estructura resistent de l’edifici, és íntegrament de formigó armat, a base de pilars i bigues formigonades “in situ”, i biguetes prefabricades en forma de π recolzades sobre les esmentades bigues. Amb aquesta solució mixta, vàrem aconseguir reduir el temps d’execució de l’obra, importància en un indret en el que als hiverns són freds i molts dies és impossible formigonar. En les façanes, les finestres amb fusteria d’alumini, estan muntades sobre pre-marcs d’acer. Les targes superiors són de pavès, i en les parts opaques el disseny de l’especejament, combina franges a base de blocs de formigó, amb franges de maó. A la plaça interior, dissenyada per a maniobrar els vehicles, les portes dels diferents magatzems i garatges que l’envolten, estan composades a base de triangles pintats de diferents colors, com una forma d’identificar-les. Ara fa vint anys Al refer el que vaig escriure en acabar l’edifici, ara fa vint anys, recordo amb nostàlgia la forma de dirigir les obres d’aquella època. Un cop a la setmana després de travessar la collada de Tosses, molt sovint nevada, ens trobàvem a peu d’obra: L’Andrés Alcolea que era l’encarregat, en Santiago Sardà, en representació de FOCSA, en Bernardo Monclús, en representació de la propietat, i jo mateix. I després d’una jornada intensa trepitjant l’obra i sense el destorb dels telèfons mòbils, anàvem junts a dinar, i a taula, continuaven les converses entorn a l’obra, en la que tots col·laboràvem positivament i amb entusiasme. En fi, uns dies molt diferents als de les visites d’obra actuals, gairebé sempre visites virtuals en el sentit de no acariciar els pilars i murs, i trepitjar els forjats, i que es desenvolupen al voltant d’una taula situada en una barraca prefabricada, i en les que gairebé només es parla dels informes rebuts de les diferents empreses de control, i de preus contradictoris.