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Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.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.
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.
It consists of a space with high ceilings, generous dimensions and it is presided over by an ordered series of pillars, beams and large windows which were fragmented and organised to allow diverse environments.
The main element of the intervention was a partition of different heights that sought in its broken geometry the floor’s maximum stability. It was a kind of complex screen that contained windows, sliding curtains, sconces, washable plastic bands, corners, plinths and trims.
This initial exercise already shows a way of doing things that will be present in many of the later works. Concern for comfort, care for the construction no matter how simple and the assessment of the place where it is intervened were the guides that accompanied the project on its way to reach a form, which from the beginning was wanted more as a consequence that as something determinant.
From the perspective of this work, fifty years later it is easy to detect the cultural world from which it received so many fundamental influences. The admired Italian architects of the time were then dedicated to recovering aspects forgotten by the early avant-garde, to consequently expanding the vocabulary used by them, to rescuing ornamentation as an expression of the construction process, to considering the aging of things, to taking into account the environment as a priority... and all this was very interesting, and their works were just a few kilometers away.
Studio PER, Lluís Clotet i Ballús, Oscar Tusquets Blanca