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Historical Archive which, thanks to its documental richness, provides a large amount of valuable –and in some cases unpublished– graphic documentation.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.
The peculiarity of the program leads Coderch to rehearse an unprecedented distribution organisation, on a plot neighbouring the Catasús house, built ten years earlier. From the entrance you reach a distributor connected to a patio that gives light to the central areas, and which is conceived as a semi-covered greenhouse. From here you can access the garden through a small porch, and the bedroom area through a second, completely independent distributor. The living room has its back to the parking plot and adopts a fairly closed configuration, although facing south and the garden. The dining room takes on special importance, being in the visual axis that crosses the whole house, from the bedrooms to the opposite façade, where there is a second semi-covered patio. Coderch conceives an L-shaped house, with a large central axis, in which the situation of each room is determined by its intrinsic configuration and by the position it occupies in the general circulation system.
The Gili House is located in the same urbanisation on which Coderch had built the Catasús House years before, in the Terramar urbanisation in Sitges. Regarding a regulation that obliges you to give up a specific space with respect to the neighbours and the street and to limit yourself to this by means of shrubbery and not construction fences, the entrance through the parking lot is again emphasised as the first filter.
The distribution system remains T-shaped, but despite maintaining the layout of the service wing, it exchanges the position between the common and the private area. Forced by a wider room program, with the consequent setback in the rooms to the southeast, the patio changes its role and loses the intention of the previous applications. The hall has ceased to be the centre of visual vectors of the house. You enter from the parking lot at 90º, and you find yourself with the side view of the light coming in from the yard and the diffused light coming in frontally from the porch in the garden. The light has stopped guiding and tensioning the space towards the living room, and a new 90º turn is forced to finish accessing it, again without having a view of the garden, but directed towards a wall that guides us towards the pool area.
The patio therefore becomes a beautifying element, with its slats, a kind of atrium that, despite absorbing some of the activities passing through the house, has lost the directional qualities that defined previous proposals.
In relation to the rest of the single-family houses by Coderch, this one indicates a new turn with respect to those that had been deriving from the novelties introduced in Catasús House.