COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Type: Corporate

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Sepe Offices

    Sepe Offices

    Sepe is Spain’s national public employment service. We won the public competition to design a compact architectural intervention consisting of office spaces for this important institution. Although the project is relatively simple, it is located within an existing building. The “site” therefore occupies part of the ground and second floors of a residential block in a recently developed neighborhood of San Sebastián.

    Located in the north of Spain, San Sebastián is a vibrant city defined by the meeting of sea and rock, and by a particular condition of light.

    Also, it is the city of the two lights of Europe. The first is the dense, atmospheric light of Northern Europe, a deep, material blue, as seen in La Concha Bay and captured in The Comb of the Winds by Eduardo Chillida. The second is the clear, white light of Southern Europe, associated with public life and the use of the street. Together, these contrasting lights define the city’s spatial and cultural identity.

    The project seeks to create a space with a strong public character, not through imposed symbolism but through qualities intrinsic to the city’s culture and environment.

    The solid blue light of the North of Europe. La Concha Bay, San Sebastian.

    Our approach was to unify these different lights, embracing their diversity while establishing a meaningful relationship with the exterior and the surrounding geography. That is, with nature within the city. In this context, light becomes our primary material.

    At the core of the project, a central vertical space is filled with the white light of Southern Europe. A system of suspended white panels reflects and diffuses light, bathing the interior with a clean, soft, and transparent luminosity, while increasing the overall amount of natural light.

    The perimeter of the intervention enhances the presence of natural light through a blue glass façade supported by a black steel structure. This element evokes the dense, colored light of Northern Europe, producing a heterogeneous and vibrant atmosphere. Perforated wooden panels filter the incoming light while protecting the offices from excessive exposure and external views.

    Above, a transparent skylight allows visual continuity through the interior of the block, while also acknowledging the presence of the residential terraces and domestic life on the upper floors.

    These two types of light, dense and diffuse, are familiar to those who inhabit the space. They form part of their everyday landscape. At the same time, they contribute to the public character required by the institution, transforming the project into an open and welcoming space for all.

  • Software and Biotechnology Plants

    Software and Biotechnology Plants

    The Technology Park brings together high-tech industries within a consolidated research environment. In its latest phase of development, two new buildings were commissioned for software and biotechnology, each developed through an independent architectural competition and conceived to operate autonomously.

    Both projects were later selected for exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum, in recognition of their exploration of verticality and urban presence within a low-density industrial context.

    Our relationship with nature has shifted significantly over the course of the century: it has become less invasive, more mediated, yet at the same time more intense. The Software and Biotechnology buildings respond to this condition as compact volumes wrapped in a ductile envelope—resembling a mass of grass or a plant stem—suggesting forms that could have pre-existed the surrounding infrastructure. They appear as autonomous fragments, establishing a direct yet non-invasive relationship with both users and landscape.

    The architecture pursues a stripped-down, “fat-free” approach. Construction is conceived as a direct system, without superfluous layers. Natural light is filtered through the constructive elements, while materials are presented with clarity: exposed concrete in its most raw and unembellished state, and glass sun visors fixed with untreated stainless steel plates. The outer glass layer, carrying a subtle hand-drawn pattern, produces a soft, almost silky appearance from one angle, and complete transparency from another.

    The façades operate as environmental devices. Conceived as double ventilated skins, they allow the buildings to breathe, mediating between interior and exterior while regulating energy and spatial conditions. The interstitial space between the two layers becomes an inhabitable zone, maintaining a continuous relationship with the surroundings.

    Through their geometry and material continuity, the buildings dissolve clear boundaries, allowing light to pass without obstruction. Notably, their configuration avoids a defined north-facing façade—traditionally associated in this region with cold and humid conditions. Their compactness and softly articulated surfaces enable a fluid perception in motion, allowing both pedestrians and drivers to experience them as continuous, rounded objects.

    At ground level, an entry plaza integrates shared amenities for workers, including a kindergarten, café, gym, and beauty salon, reinforcing the buildings’ role within a broader social and urban framework.

  • Health Department Headquarters

    Health Department Headquarters

    The new Basque Health Department headquarters is
    located at the last site that still remained unbuilt on the
    administrative and Business Center of Bilbao. Up to now,
    the institution was suffering the spread of its staff in several
    buildings, hardly recognizable by citizens, away from each
    other and uncomfortable for both users and technical
    services. The project at the same time involves both economic and property profits.

    The aim of the new building is bringing together
    staff in a recognizable place, in order to increase the
    efficiency of the service and identify easily the corporation.

    The site is located in the crossroad of two important streets
    of the Ensanche, designed in 1862. The restrictive city rules
    compel to repeat the shape of the neighboring walls,
    reducing penthouses according to a curved directive,
    chamfering the corner and building a tower on it.

    The folded façade generates multiple visual directions from
    inside to the streets bellow, and also from the highest floors
    to the landscape that surrounds the city, a highly effective
    mechanism for the incorporation of urban vitality inside the
    building.

    The double façade solves not only all the mentioned urban
    requirements but also those concerning energetic, fireresistant
    and acoustic insulation. This climatic improvement
    enables the elimination of the conventional air-conditioning
    installation as well as the false ceiling. Thus, the sound
    produced by the building is reduced, air recirculation in
    workplaces disappears, with a significant increase of health
    conditions, and the volume occupied per floor is also
    reduced, saving resources consumed by the construction.

    The façade responds to the investigation launched in the
    previous projects, which considers the wrapper as a
    system. The construction techniques, the operation of the
    building, the energy exchange, the city and also the very
    fact, the desire to be… take part in the system definition, but
    never the elevation or the composition. The system must
    provide a valid response to the different situations
    generated in the façade. Instead of merely set the building
    on the one hand and shaping the urban space on the other,
    the façade system should become a social vehicle.

    The building concentrates services and communications in a vertical spine attached to the longest party hedge and generates seven open floors assigned for offices. Above this, there are two floors for local representative and institutional use. The workspace benefits of the permeable, passable and livable volume of the building. The board hall takes up the double height of the tower. The auditorium, its foyer and its appendages are situated in the first basement. Further below there are two parking floors and one fourth level for archives. The car lifts allow access to all the basement levels.

    The project emphasizes the place to sit on the threshold, at the doorway of a house, looking down the road and the back into the home.

  • Public Services Headquarters

    Public Services Headquarters

    The project transforms an office floor into a flexible and continuous working environment, where space is understood as an open and adaptable field. All work areas are organized to ensure access to natural light, exterior views, and shared facilities, reinforcing a sense of collective workspace.

    The layout establishes a clear organization between two singular zones: management and representation areas to the west, and service, technical, and multipurpose spaces to the east. Between them, circulation and common areas unfold as a continuous sequence, allowing intuitive orientation and fluid movement.

    The intervention redefines the existing envelope through a new interior perimeter that modulates scale and light. Sloped white surfaces capture and diffuse natural light, generating changing atmospheres throughout the day and reinforcing the perception of depth and continuity.

    Materiality enhances this effect: light is reflected across wooden floors, polished steel surfaces, and translucent elements, producing a layered and dynamic interior. The result is a workspace that combines clarity, flexibility, and environmental quality within a precise architectural framework.

  • 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.