The new building was located near the Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages. The Llobregat river embraced there, with an abrupt gesture, magnificent fields of cereals and vineyards that housed the imposing Romanesque monastery and later the Carbó textile factory. Two monuments of the past that testified with great clarity and expressive force to two brilliant moments in the country's history.
The new building did not want to stand as an element that would blur the previous ones or take away their prominence, and sought to distance itself from their architectural, constructive and geometric conceptions. Already in the initial drawings, there appeared lines that did not refer to known building types, but rather insinuated malleable, pasty forms, with amorphous geometries that suggested adaptation and camouflage. In this way, the new organism was easily respecting old walls, fences, paths, stairs, plantations... and adapting to the constant changes of an inconcrete programme that obliged it to change its size, occupation and height, even embracing the neighbouring house of the former owners in a permanent demonstration of its great docility and flexibility. A raised floor, a generous false ceiling and a free floor plan reinforced the desire to accommodate the unpredictable.
The building was designed so that from the inside one could experience the feeling of being in a place surrounded by nature, of being inside it, of being able to see the trees, the birds and the rain from very close up. This is why the vertical plane separating the interior and exterior was completely glazed. A surface which, depending on the intensity of the light, was transparent or reflective, so that at times the built volume disappeared and at others it was totally integrated into the surroundings by reflecting the exterior as if it were a mirror.
The control of sun, light and privacy was achieved through a complex façade of varying thickness, ranging from zero in the entrance area to 13m at the widest point. It was a band defined by the vertical plane of glass enclosing the building on one side and by a wall of almost the same height on the other. This wall made use of pieces of old stone walls which were extended with new concrete walls and in some areas large windows were opened up to allow controlled views of the landscape. In between these two vertical planes, horizontal shading canopies were installed at the same level as the interior ceiling and trees were planted to ensure solar protection and quality of light. This thick façade of variable width easily resolved the compromise between the interior form that the building required and the exterior form that the site demanded, while also creating a quiet, landscaped intermediate space that visually prolonged the interior space and formed an inseparable unit with it.
Generous vertical skylights facing north balanced the light in the areas of the ground floor furthest from the perimeter.
