COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Status: Proposal

  • Soto del Real Emergency Center

    Soto del Real Emergency Center

    The project is located on a well-connected site at the edge of Soto del Real, directly linked to the main urban axis while in close proximity to residential areas. This dual condition—operational efficiency and coexistence with domestic life—defines the proposal. The intervention prioritizes clear and independent flows: emergency vehicles connect directly to the main avenue, while pedestrian access is integrated into a continuous civic ground, minimizing interference with the surrounding streets.

    The building is conceived as a simple and legible system. A rectangular volume organizes the three emergency services within a unified structure, allowing immediate use and long-term adaptability. Rather than fixing a rigid layout, the project establishes a flexible framework based on structural regularity and modular organization, capable of accommodating change without altering its logic.

    A large horizontal plane defines the building’s presence. It operates as a protective device that shelters vehicles, users and access areas, while giving the building a clear civic identity. This element mediates between climate and activity, reinforcing the condition of the building as an open and accessible public infrastructure.

    Color is used as an operative system rather than a graphic layer. Each service is directly identified through a specific color, allowing immediate orientation without the need for signage or written information. This chromatic code organizes access, use and perception, ensuring clarity in situations where time and precision are critical.

    The project balances visibility and integration. While the building is clearly recognizable as a public facility, its controlled scale, vegetation buffers and compact form ensure a respectful coexistence with the surrounding residential fabric. The result is a building that operates simultaneously as infrastructure, workplace and civic reference.

  • New Access Reina Sofía Museum

    New Access Reina Sofía Museum

    The project operates within the complex context of the Museo Reina Sofía, where different architectures, historical layers and urban conditions coexist under the highest level of heritage protection. The intervention does not seek to introduce a new formal layer, but to work from within this condition, reorganizing access, circulation and the relationship between the Museum and the city without altering the existing balance.

    From this position, a fundamental shift is proposed in the way the Museum is accessed. Instead of the current model, concentrated around a single hierarchized entrance, the project establishes a more open and distributed system, consistent both with the original logic of the hospital building and with the contemporary condition of the institution.

    This allows the Museum to reconnect with the Paseo del Prado axis, integrating it more directly into the pedestrian and cultural flows of the city. The intervention does not rely on a new representative façade, but on establishing a real continuity between urban space, the existing vaulted structures and the interior of the building, reducing the distance between the Museum and its surroundings.

    Circulation is redefined accordingly. The conventional sequence of entry, control and visit is replaced by a more flexible system, where the visitor can construct their own path, access different areas of the building and engage with it in a non-linear and less prescriptive way.

    Within this broader strategy, the intervention in the Nouvel courtyard introduces a specific element that concentrates access, reception and distribution. It is conceived as a lightweight and reversible piece, closer to an operational device than to a conventional building, capable of resolving the functional requirements of the Museum with clarity and precision.

    Its placement follows a clear logic: occupying a currently residual area of the courtyard and transforming it into an active point within the complex, without interfering with the public character of the space or competing with the existing architectures. In this way, it operates as a mediator between the Sabatini and Nouvel buildings.

    Its material condition reinforces this approach. The glass envelope allows the element to dissolve into its surroundings, reflecting the existing buildings and maintaining their prominence. At the same time, it incorporates an active surface capable of communicating information, content and activity towards the exterior.

    The element functions as a filter that organizes access and services—ticketing, control and information—while establishing a new form of relationship with the public. Rather than a defined entrance, it operates as a continuous threshold that extends the Museum into the city and transforms the experience of arrival.

    The project, as a whole, does not add new architecture, but reorganizes the existing one to make it more legible, accessible and coherent with its current condition, establishing a clearer continuity between institution, public space and everyday use.

    In association with Linazasoro&Sánchez Arquitectura.

  • Buildingman

    Buildingman

    In the Buildingman project participated, along with architects, structural, mechanical, electrical engineers, 3D computer designers specialized in human “architecture”, and virtual reality architects.

    He could add excitement to high density environments. It would be nice to overlay another element of animation in downtown Manhattan, or in a city of Southern Europe, or in Asia… and, at the same time, just the opposite, to a landscape of solitude.

    He is perhaps better full of windows. He is so a human mountain full of people. He is the city against itself, which has already acquired the form of man by dint of losing the identity of monument, building, house, of Architecture.

    «Who is inside? Where is the door? How have they entered?», one can ask. «Why never have you wondered who is in the neighboring buildings?», he can answer.

    The city exceeds us with its hostile maelstrom of conflicting interests, global activities, and an incomprehensible, unfathomable dimension. If we exchange the scale difference and we do the person bigger for a moment, we perceive the reality of our insignificance, of our tiny nudity.

    Now the city gets the scale that every normal person means to it: nothing. Then, with his gigantism, Buildingman reveals, publicly and with large letters, the contrary aberration. Its dimension is nothing more that the denunciation of the opposite reality. There is no one like him.

    He lifts his head towards the sky, without shame, as the person who, with that gesture, ages ago, built the first vertical aspiration. We like to think of him as the last architectural form.

  • Historical HQ Renovation

    Historical HQ Renovation

    The project restores a historicist building dating from the 1940s, located on a corner of Bilbao’s Ensanche, transforming it into a new corporate headquarters near the Health Department Headquarters previously designed by COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS.

    Successive low-quality interior interventions had severely compromised the building’s spatial integrity. The proposal consolidates the existing façades both structurally and constructively while removing the entire internal volume to create a single full-height space, open to both streets through the original classical windows.

    Within this new void, a series of suspended volumes accommodates the working areas, both inside the boxes and on their roofs. The workplaces acquire an urban scale while maintaining a high degree of privacy and spatial singularity.

    An auditorium is located in the basement, directly connected to the central space, while the roof incorporates a series of accessible open-air terraces.

    A compact service spine, visually linked to the suspended volumes, organizes the vertical circulation and integrates people, building services, logistics, and vehicle access into a single infrastructural system.

  • Atlanta History Center

    Atlanta History Center

    «The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light (…). This was the (…) southernmost Georgia, September afternoon» (Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace).

    The Atlanta History Center no longer has a North façade. The new pieces will slide in the sunlight without orthogonal walls, so they will always be bathed in light.

    A porch open to the trees, grass and flowers of Atlanta will shelter the visitors from the heat of the sun and rain water. It is an element of the tradition. The white porch is part of the history of the air and light of the South.

    Beyond the porch a new lobby is proposed. It is a clear, white and public room, but it retains some of the intimacy of a home. The light enters and the outside can be seen. Visitor services are clearly organized. The new auditorium and classrooms also have immediate access from the lobby. The retail area is located in the output path of visitors, fully incorporated into the lobby.

    Inside, acting only at the entrances to the rooms, the space of collections is now systematic. It is possible to visit all the rooms in a continuous run, without returning to the lobby or to any corridor. You may also visit selected rooms only, since all have direct access from the lobby. The size and shape of each room may be determined and changed by AHC curators.

    The main floor opens to the South, until now hidden from the rooms. Thanks to eliminate some obstacles and open two new windows, people walking on the Museum can rest their eyes on the beautiful trees of Buckhead campus and have easy access to cafe and gardens.

    Access to Ballroom is now more spacious, comfortable and independent through a pedestrian bridge and an expanded lobby. A new Miesian Palladian ramp properly connects room and gardens.

    The project, sunlit, two white lenses, is a place for memory, at once surreal and inseparable from the ground. We discovered it in the past of Georgia, where «people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I’ve always grown up with that dream».

  • Sports & Technology Center

    Sports & Technology Center

    Two independent public programmes—a Sports Centre and a Museum of Technology—occupy the same compact site. Rather than separating their identities, the project establishes a dialogue between movement and memory, physical activity and contemplation. Both buildings share the landscape while responding through distinct architectural strategies. The Sports Centre reorganizes the conventional model of sports facilities into three superimposed horizontal layers. The lower level concentrates courts, gymnasiums and changing rooms within a continuous plane dedicated to athletes. Above, a public level gathers the main entrance, restaurant and spectator areas, allowing visitors to overlook the sporting activity through a series of large openings aligned with the courts below. The building becomes a public interior where transparency and simultaneity define the spatial experience.

    The uppermost level accommodates a 250-metre golf practice range. Embedded within the tree canopy, it establishes a direct relationship with the surrounding landscape. Its elongated geometry and elevated position transform the act of sport into an open experience, where architecture gradually dissolves into air, vegetation and horizon.

    The Sports Centre is conceived as a compact volume whose organization derives directly from the programme rather than from formal composition. Structure and circulation reinforce one another, producing a building in which different activities coexist while remaining visually connected. Public life is not confined to circulation spaces but becomes part of the architectural experience itself.

    The Museum of Technology responds through an opposite condition. It is conceived as a monolithic concrete volume, stripped of visible construction details and unnecessary articulation. Rather than representing technology as a constantly changing object, the building explores its relationship with memory and permanence.

    Visitors ascend towards the main exhibition level, illuminated by diffuse natural light filtered through a translucent glass roof. Exposed concrete defines walls and floors with constructive clarity, allowing light, proportion and material continuity to shape the atmosphere. Technology is presented within a space that deliberately avoids technological expression, emphasizing instead its cultural and temporal dimension.

    The project proposes architecture as a balance between permanence and change. Sport unfolds through movement and collective activity, while the Museum preserves the evolving memory of technology. Together, the two buildings establish complementary ways of inhabiting the landscape, where public life, construction and place become part of a continuous architectural experience.

  • Physics Center

    Physics Center

    A slender prism of steel and glass rises in parallel to the eastern line of trees, establishing a precise dialogue with the existing landscape. Its placement deliberately releases the southern edge, allowing sunlight to penetrate deeply into the heart of the plot. The construction of this prism becomes a didactic instrument, articulating questions of gravity, weight, matter, and light.

    Mechanical and electrical systems, essential to the building’s metabolism, emerge onto the façade with the same clarity and dignity as offices and meeting rooms, dissolving hierarchies between served and servant spaces.

    The vertical forces that sustain the building are inscribed directly onto the plane of the façade, which operates as a graphic register of structural effort alongside the shifting silhouettes of the treetops. Transparency is not fixed but contingent, as each section of the façade modulates its opacity in response to interior light conditions, the passage of time, and the preferences of its occupants. In this way, the envelope becomes an active and responsive interface, an atmospheric membrane that negotiates between interior life and the exterior environment.

    To the south of the glass prism, at the center of the complex, a garden is proposed as a field of interwoven geometries, directly connected to the surrounding open spaces of the site. It allows the ensemble to be understood as a vegetal campus, where architecture and landscape coexist in a continuous system. Its intentions are disarmingly simple yet spatially profound: to invite sunlight into its depths, to allow linden trees and flowering species to coexist, and to enable users to traverse it with ease, inhabiting a space where nature and architecture are inseparably entwined.

  • Loewe Center of Excellence

    Loewe Center of Excellence

    The project translates Loewe’s artisan legacy into a built system where design, production, and everyday experience are integrated. Craftsmanship is understood not as exclusivity, but as a way of extending quality and precision to all scales, shaping the workplace as a space of identity.

    The building organizes production, development, logistics, and shared facilities within a clear and flexible structure. Circulation is optimized for both people and materials, while the layout allows independent growth of volumes and long-term adaptability.

    The site is treated as a continuous landscape. Permeable pavements, gardens, and a linear forest define its edges, while parking areas are integrated under vegetation. A courtyard around an existing tree marks the entrance and establishes a direct relationship between architecture and environment.

    Production areas face controlled northern light, while upper levels open onto a network of gardens. Offices and shared spaces are arranged around these outdoor rooms, creating a sequence of environments that support both work and interaction.

    Environmental strategies are embedded in the building envelope. Photovoltaic systems, natural ventilation, and careful material selection define a controlled and efficient atmosphere, shaping a contemporary industrial environment focused on both performance and well-being.

  • Surgical Building

    Surgical Building

    The project establishes a strategic update of the sanitary-gerontological campus in Zumárraga, adapting the existing planning framework to new healthcare and social demands. It operates not as a single building intervention, but as a reorganization of an already consolidated system of hospital and care facilities.

    The proposal enables the expansion of the current program through the introduction of new volumes, including a surgical block and the extension of existing hospital wings. These additions are conceived as part of a coherent system, maintaining alignment with the existing structures while allowing for future growth and technological adaptation.

    A key aspect of the intervention lies in redefining internal connectivity. New links between buildings—both at ground level and above—ensure functional continuity across the complex, improving the efficiency of healthcare operations and patient flows.

    At the urban scale, the project reorganizes access, circulation, and parking. A new vehicular access is introduced to reduce pressure on existing routes, while pedestrian connections are enhanced to improve accessibility and clarity of movement throughout the site.

    The overall strategy defines a flexible and phased framework, capable of accommodating long-term transformations. By integrating architecture, infrastructure, and landscape, the project reinforces the campus as a coherent and evolving healthcare environment.

  • Solar Hexaprism

    Solar Hexaprism

    The interior of the prism is structured around a longitudinal circulation spine, flooded with natural light, perforated and permeable, rising up to the roof and operating as a singular spatial continuum. It becomes a large shared interior room—an unavoidable passage where encounters naturally occur. This space connects all residents with one another and with the roof above, which in turn functions as a collective infrastructure: a provider of energy, physical activity, leisure, food production, workspaces, and care.

    The roof—the fifth façade of the Hexaprisma—is conceived as a microcity that complements and extends the domestic realm. It integrates photovoltaic fields, vegetated surfaces, individual urban gardens, solariums, a continuous jogging track, gym facilities, coworking areas, laundries, rentable kitchens (both open and enclosed), dining spaces, and a wide range of environments for interaction. These programs form a topological ecosystem of shared functions. Each activity adopts a specific geometry—coworking spaces as rectangles, laundries as capsules, kitchens as half-moons, gardens as cubes—so that architecture itself becomes a catalyst for social exchange, allowing people to inhabit the roof through the pretexts of encounter.

    Valladolid, an historic city set within the Castilian plateau and the capital of Castilla y León, is characterized by an extreme continental climate, with annual temperature variations reaching up to 50°C. The site reflects this condition: a north-facing slope with undulating topography and a 27-meter difference between its highest and lowest points, located in Parquesol, to the west of the city, near significant urban facilities.

    The building takes the form of a six-sided prism that hovers above the terrain. Anchored on its eastern edge, it gradually lifts as the land descends, minimizing earthworks and avoiding retaining structures. This strategy preserves the existing landscape—its tree clusters and pedestrian paths—while allowing the ground to flow beneath the building. The resulting shaded undercroft becomes an extension of the public realm: a continuous, undulating space for play, movement, cycling, and shelter, activating communal life and reinforcing the continuity of the natural environment.

    In section, the Hexaprisma operates as a solar machine, its performance enhanced by the sixth façade. The building breathes vertically through its central spine, enabling controlled natural stack ventilation. All dwellings benefit from north–south cross-ventilation—the most efficient passive cooling strategy throughout the year. The building harnesses solar energy to generate electricity, sustain rooftop agriculture, and maintain vegetated surfaces that improve thermal performance. During summer, pressure differentials across the prism’s faces induce continuous airflow around its envelope, cooling it naturally, efficiently, and without emissions.

    Each dwelling functions as a micro-scale solar device within the larger system. A terrace-box captures and distributes light and air, while adjustable louvers on the opposite façade regulate cross-ventilation across the three primary spaces of the unit. The 215 bathrooms are conceived as compact, standardized elements suitable for prefabrication, ensuring construction quality and efficiency. The internal layout allows for both fluid connectivity and complete independence: sliding partitions and dual circulation systems enable the two bedrooms to operate either as part of a shared dwelling or as autonomous micro-apartments, each with its own bathroom, dressing area, and terrace access. The central band of the dwelling—terrace, living areas, kitchen, and entrance—becomes the social core.

    Ultimately, the same dynamic unfolds at every scale: within the dwelling, across the building, and in its relationship with the city. It is the productive tension between individuality and community, between personal identity and collective life. The built environment should reflect and celebrate this richness—grounded in choice, respect, and the shared experience of living together.