COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Status: Built

  • Satellite Air Traffic Center

    Satellite Air Traffic Center

    In 2000, an international ideas competition was launched to design the first facility capable of controlling the new constellation of 30 Galileo satellites, the European system conceived to ensure the continent’s strategic autonomy from the United States GPS network.

    This initiative represented a technological challenge not only for Spain but for the European Union as a whole, demanding a level of performance and technical complexity unprecedented within its field.

    Spain would thus become the first of four countries to host this new generation of satellite-based air traffic control infrastructure. Located on the outskirts of Madrid, the project integrates this emerging guidance system with existing centralized control operations and a range of international platforms associated with advanced air traffic technologies.

    The site is highly singular. Set within the Jarama river basin, it embodies both the measured horizontality of the Castilian plateau and the latent dynamism of its open, expansive condition. The proximity of military runways reinforces the perception of an uninterrupted, stratified landscape, where ground and sky establish a continuous visual and operational field.

    The building is conceived as an interface with this vast territorial horizon. Its northern façade unfolds as a continuous glazed plane, extending beyond its limits to frame distant views across the plain, while foregrounding the powerful presence of aircraft in motion along the adjacent runways.

    Simultaneously, the project establishes a precise relationship with the sky. A longitudinal skylight, running parallel to the glazed façade, introduces calibrated natural light into the interior while enabling visual continuity with the celestial sphere. This device operates both atmospherically and symbolically, evoking the trajectories of flight and the orbital logic of satellites.

    The roofscape emerges as a topographical construct. It extends and reinterprets the existing embankments and paths of the site, transforming the building into an artificial ground that preserves and amplifies the memory of the terrain. In this way, the project does not simply occupy the landscape but becomes a continuation of it, a constructed plateau. In this gesture resonates the metaphor proposed by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who described Madrid as a condition suspended upon an elevated plane.

    Two decades later, the building has not only fulfilled its initial ambitions but has intensified its relevance. It now accommodates the European satellite-based air navigation system, centralized air traffic control platforms, and a range of European and international space-related infrastructures. It continues to develop Galileo-related programs, anticipates the expansion of its activities through emerging technologies, and plays a strategic role within the current critical geopolitical context of the European Union. It stands at the forefront of airspace management, contributing decisively to the security and operational autonomy of the Union.

    The building has proven its civic and institutional value, a realized vision that remains open to further evolution. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, a return visit reveals a facility fully in operation, yet still oriented toward the future. Its directors reflect with quiet determination, their gaze still fixed on the satellites: more remains to be done.

  • Research and Laboratories

    Research and Laboratories

    The complex is conceived to accommodate 40,000 m² of programmatic workspace alongside nearly 1,000 parking spaces, delicately inscribed within a gently sloping, verdant site.

    The architectural response seeks to preserve and reinterpret the latent spirit of the landscape, two undulating hills set against a distant horizon of low mountains. The built form is articulated into three elongated prisms, two rendered in glass, ethereal and permeable, and a third, more tectonic in expression, composed of granite and concrete. These volumes are carefully stratified along the natural topography. A fourth cubic volume, also glazed, establishes a measured dialogue with the stone prism, together framing a square that opens toward the broadest expanse of the valley.

    The glass façades act as membranes, capturing and diffusing the humid, mist laden atmosphere characteristic of the region, allowing the building to dissolve into its environmental context.

    Despite the considerable scale of the intervention, the project aspires to maintain a legible and humane proportion, ensuring that each workspace retains a clear spatial and relational continuity with both the ensemble and the surrounding landscape.

    The composition is organized into four primary volumes. The two linear glazed prisms house office functions. The linear stone volume accommodates shared and communal services. The cubic glazed pavilion is dedicated to laboratory spaces.

    Between the two parallel prisms, an enclosed atrium emerges, a suspended, almost immaterial void, within which a hovering volume is situated to house the Command and Control Center, evoking a sense of weightlessness and central oversight.

    Within the glazed buildings, stone is deployed extensively, both as a partial cladding to the structural framework and as a means of constructing deep transitional thresholds along the curtain walls.

    At night, the rear façade of the stone volume, facing the mountainous backdrop, is suffused with a blue luminescence, transforming it into a symbolic plane that expresses the civic and territorial vocation of the administrative headquarters.

  • Data Processing Center

    Data Processing Center

    Due to operational requirements, the building was required to occupy the central area of the complex, on a sloping site overlooking the Nervión valley. However, a conscious effort was made to preserve this central zone, topographically understood as a geometric point of inflection, as free and unbuilt as possible. To this end, the project is resolved through the fragmentation of the program into two low-lying volumes, carefully adapted to the natural gradient. The terrain itself penetrates the building, flowing between both bodies.

    The division of the program and the embedding of the volumes within the ground mitigate the presence of built mass at the most significant point of the site, which also constitutes the convergence of visual axes from the surrounding buildings. Ultimately, the intervention aspires to a condition of minimal occupation, an architecture that, metaphorically, refrains from “taking the air.”

    The interior spaces, level with or subtly sunken into the ground, recover a vernacular sensibility rooted in Basque architecture, characterized by its tactile and climatic proximity to the humid terrain and its dispersed relationship with the landscape.

    One of the volumes, elongated in plan, accommodates the primary workspaces. The second volume contains technical areas, open-plan rooms, lecture halls, and multipurpose spaces. A continuous glazed façade opens onto the slope, establishing a direct visual and spatial relationship with the surrounding landscape. Courtyards and gardened embankments, resulting from the precise excavation and modeling of the terrain, introduce natural light into all work areas. Illumination is further reinforced through extensive horizontal glazing, aligned with the exterior ground level. Circulation routes traversing this volume and connecting it to the adjacent block are uniformly top-lit, conceived as interior streets and plazas.

    In this way, a work environment oriented toward the virtual is enveloped by the tangible presence of sunlight, sky, earth, and vegetation.

    The roof of the compact volume is conceived as a fifth façade, a horizontal plane that expresses the diversity of interior uses. Part of this surface is configured as a cobbled plaza that serves as the principal access. Entry and security control are housed within a small, transparent pavilion, reached by traversing the roofscape, moving between aluminum skylights, across the stone platform, and alongside horizontal glazed planes.

    The tower, which accommodates systems requiring natural ventilation and elevated communication infrastructures, manifests the technical and immaterial character of the program, emerging as a vertical counterpoint within the composition.

  • Penthouse Refurbishment

    Penthouse Refurbishment

    The project transforms a penthouse apartment for an elderly couple by simplifying its spatial organization and improving continuity. Located in Huesca, the dwelling opens to two contrasting landscapes: the Pyrenees to the east and the desert to the west.

    The intervention removes an internal wall that previously separated both orientations, freeing the center of the house and creating a continuous living space connected to the terraces. Light becomes the main structuring element, crossing the interior throughout the day and reinforcing the unity of the space.

    A system of adjustable aluminium slats regulates light and temperature, while cross ventilation between façades ensures environmental comfort. The project focuses on minimal means to achieve spatial clarity, environmental performance, and a stronger relationship with the surrounding landscape.

  • Olympic Ice Arena

    Olympic Ice Arena

    The Olympic Ice Arena was the result of an important international competition for a building that was to house the first Olympic event ever in the Pyrenees Mountains, a two-icerings Olympic pavilion to celebrate hockey, figure skating, short track and curling competitions, and simultaneously be a recreational ice center.

    The site is in northern Spain, in Huesca province. It is the Spanish landscape of the mountains, one of the idiosyncratic images of Europe. When we visited that place, immediately thought about the first Winter Olympic Games in history, held in 1924 at the Alps. At that time, all the tournaments were held in the outdoors, at the foot of Montblanc in Chamonix. When the competitors played hockey outdoors, it was magical the way both players and public experienced the nature. We can not do that today because sportive activities are hyper regulated, buildings became extremely technical and accomplish innumerable requirements.

    When we started to work whit institutions, stakeholders and users we perceived other ancient powerful reality, present from the origin of the Olympics in Greece, obviously present also in 1924 and currently persistent: the fascination for both competition and triumph. There are people who devote their entire youths —that is, probably their entire lives— not to get an Olympic medal necessarily, but just to have the chance to get one Olympic medal. And these are the people who support the idea of having recurrent peaceful happy international meetings of nations.

    We wanted to build something that would try to answer these two questions: first, the landscape, the city, the history; and then, the Olympic aspiration. We wanted a place for all these dreams. Focused on the idea of playing hockey outdoors, we wanted something more than a sustainable construction, but a place with no oppositions, a soft place. So this is a building with no façade, no vertical boundaries. We wanted content with no container. The content was able to take the strength of the nearby Oroel Mount and the Pyrenees peaks, and met directly the ground without any sort of façade.

    A thin membrane is, at the same time, structure, façade, roof and technical systems. It contains the entire air conditioning system —included into the main structure to avoid the air conditioning ducts that typically are all around the ice arenas interiors—, and the lighting, sound and security systems. The importance of the membrane is revealed in the interior, where it organizes successfully all the functions and circulations in
    the pavilion. In fact, the glass membrane is the only constructive detail of the building. Under that delicate efficient shell there is only concrete, brick and ice, with no constructive details.

    A thin membrane is, at the same time, structure, façade, roof and technical systems. It contains the entire air conditioning system —included into the main structure to avoid the air conditioning ducts that typically are all around the ice arenas interiors—, and the lighting, sound and security systems. The importance of the membrane is revealed in the interior, where it organizes successfully all the functions and circulations in
    the pavilion. In fact, the glass membrane is the only constructive detail of the building. Under that delicate efficient shell there is only concrete, brick and ice, with no constructive details.

    The membrane is perceived as a soft crystal of ice, and it must be crossed in order to accede —like in a natural experience, like a physical interaction with the landscape itself. This experience not only means that it is possible to see the landscape; it involves perceiving the physical substances on it: natural light, sun, water, or snow, because when it is raining the user is under the rain, or under the snow if it is snowing. In the winter, the sun comes into the building crossing layers of snow. Sometimes the sun enters through the glass dome, drawing on the floor shadows of the snow that has accumulated on top of the building. The perception of the landscape is really intense.

  • Francisco Cabrero Building Renovation

    Francisco Cabrero Building Renovation

    The building for the José Antonio Girón Vocational Training School stands as the only work by Francisco Cabrero in Barcelona. Conceived and executed within a remarkably compressed timeframe, just three summer months including excavation and retaining works, it was completed in time for the opening of the academic year in September 1968.

    The project materialized as a large, two-storey rectangular volume accommodating facilities for both students and faculty.The building for the José Antonio Girón Vocational Training School stands as the only work by Francisco Cabrero in Barcelona. Conceived and executed within a remarkably compressed timeframe, just three summer months including excavation and retaining works, it was completed in time for the opening of the academic year in September 1968. The project materialized as a large, two-storey rectangular volume accommodating facilities for both students and faculty.

    The upper level housed a vast, column-free, double-height hall, a continuous and uninterrupted spatial field capable of alternating between assembly hall and student refectory. The ground floor organized the more service-oriented functions, including kitchens, cafeteria and faculty club. Above, the roof unfolded as an accessible terrace, a belvedere overlooking the surrounding landscape.

    Its scale, conceptual and structural clarity, technological audacity, and the refined interplay between interior void, structural system and transparent envelope elevate the building to the status of a true modern monument, typologically singular within the urban fabric of Barcelona.

    At the turn of the century, the building entered a prolonged period of underuse, neglect and partial ruin, to the extent that its demolition was decreed in 2005, an outcome from which it was fortunately reprieved at the last moment. Following this decision, it was incorporated into the campus of the Institut d’Ensenyament Secundari Joan Brossa, consolidating its recognition as a modern masterpiece within specialized architectural discourse.

    A comprehensive restoration was undertaken, encompassing structure, envelope, partitions and all technical systems. A renewed educational and service program was introduced, including an assembly hall, classrooms, dining facilities, kitchen, library and two studios for visual arts. The intervention reinstated the building’s original clarity and modernity, while reaffirming its primary educational vocation.

    The renewed façade joinery and solar control systems enabled compliance with stringent contemporary energy regulations, while preserving the building’s essential lightness and transparency and significantly reducing energy demand. In this way, the inherent logic of the original design was mobilized in favor of interior luminosity and environmental performance.

    The original spatial configuration was fully recovered. The upper floor was adapted to accommodate classrooms, yet movable partitions allow the reconstitution of the original grand hall, maintaining both the stage and the unitary functioning of the level as an assembly space.

    The ground floor, likewise, entirely restored, now hosts more technically equipped environments for student use, including a cafeteria dining hall, documentation center, winter garden and art studios. Throughout, the building retains the austere character of the original work, and contemporary technical systems are left exposed in dialogue with the restored construction and structural fabric.

    In association with Xavier Güell.

  • Police People House

    Police People House

    From the site Bilbao’s dense urban length is visible, squeezed on the narrow and deep banks of the river Nervión. Also visible is the green landscape, with water and vertical slopes that confine the city and compress it against the estuary.

    Biscayan’s rainy atmosphere seems to lie dormant on the site. The land, the nearby hills, the city in front and below, the mountains from the opposite bank and even the moist air come together in an almost complete continuity, as if they were the same subject.

    The soil itself is unstable. It is uncertain. It is the result of having quickly filled an open mine, with pits up to 50 m deep, which formed a cavernous place in its physical reality and its memory.

    Upstream, other mine sites have been transformed, also visible from the site, which confirm the history of this exchange between matter and soil, the life of the city and that of men, the densification of the territory and the air.

    Above this vacillating place, buildings do not have any mass. Folded aluminum sheets acquire enough inertia to be supported in the air.

    To the North, Public Safety’s concatenated planes are perceived from distant areas and set up a close relationship with the steep topography of the slope.

    To the South, the Civil Protection areas are emptied towards the valley. Like the old fire stations, they take the public presence of the building to a new and large urban area.

    In these buildings, there is still a reference to some industrial constructions, those building-machines or process decanters that have transformed the history of the city and set off the lives of its people. Probably, both programs could be interchangeable through their high umbilical cord.

  • Firefighters House

    Firefighters House

    The building is the result of an international ideas competition and houses the central Fire Department of Bilbao, serving a European urban area of over one million people. Like traditional European fire stations, it establishes its civic presence through a large urban square, opening itself to the city.

    The project emerges from the character of its environment. The rainy atmosphere seems to settle over the site, where the ground, the surrounding hills, the city below, the distant mountains across the river, and even the humid air merge into an almost continuous whole. Glass and crumpled aluminum extend this condition, becoming a material expression of that atmosphere while also recalling the industrial heritage of Bilbao and the Basque Country—those 19th-century building-machines and processing structures that transformed the region and shaped its identity.

    Conceived as an efficient operational system, the building supports the work of first responders through a precise overlap of functions—rest, preparation, and action. A capillary network of fire poles and vertical connections ensures immediate response and continuous readiness.

    Inside, the Firemen’s House opens toward the valley. From within, the dense urban fabric appears compressed along the narrow riverbanks, while the surrounding green landscape, with its steep and rain-soaked slopes, encloses the city and presses it toward the estuary.

    The building deliberately avoids conventional finishing details. Rather than applying a superficial decorative layer, it preserves the construction process itself. The physical labor of those who built it remains present and tangible. Although fully operational, the building still carries the imprint of that manual effort—an essential part of its character.

  • E8 Building

    E8 Building

    Situated at the western boundary of the Álava Technology Park, the E8 complex defines the most significant visual edge of the boulevard’s urban axis. Rather than acting as an isolated object, the project establishes a direct relationship with the surrounding hills, using architecture as a device to frame and intensify the landscape.

    Inside, structure remains legible and proportion governs the spatial sequence. Light penetrates deeply into the floor plates, reinforcing clarity and openness. The result is a corporate environment defined not by enclosure, but by continuity between structure, material and landscape.

    The façades operate as a layered system. Sculpted glass fragments reflect sky, trees and topography, dissolving the mass of the buildings into their environment. This reflective condition is not decorative; it is a tectonic strategy that binds structure and landscape into a single perceptual field.

    A double-skin façade introduces a climatic buffer between interior and exterior. The air cavity improves thermal insulation in winter while enabling controlled air circulation in summer, significantly reducing energy demand. Environmental performance is embedded in the architectural logic rather than applied as an add-on.

    The project establishes a series of spatial gradients rather than a single fixed boundary between architecture and landscape. Different layers of enclosure mediate the transition from fully interiorized environments to open contact with the surrounding terrain. Opaque surfaces and controlled interior spaces gradually give way to structural frames, glazed planes and semi-open areas where the presence of the exterior becomes increasingly perceptible. Through this sequence, the building constructs intermediate conditions in which structure, light and air shape the spatial experience.

    This progression continues in the way the project engages with the landscape. The surroundings alternate between untouched natural conditions and areas where vegetation is carefully integrated into the architectural ground plane. Rather than opposing the natural and the artificial as separate realms, the project organizes them along a continuum. Structure, façade and planted surfaces work together to produce a gradual transition between built form and landscape.