COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Type: Cultural

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Reina Sofía Museum Public Areas

    Reina Sofía Museum Public Areas

    The Sabatini building of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the result of successive historical transformations. Conceived by José de Hermosilla as Madrid’s General Hospital and later adapted by Antonio Fernández Alba into the Museum’s first headquarters, it gradually acquired an orientation that no longer corresponds to the contemporary city. Its main public entrance turns away from the Paseo del Prado, limiting the relationship between the institution and one of Madrid’s principal cultural and urban axes.

    The project originates from a simple intention: to open the Museum without adding architecture. Rather than extending the building through new volumes or attached elements, the proposal works entirely with its existing spatial and constructive capacities. The intervention reveals possibilities already embedded within the historical structure, allowing the building to be transformed through reconfiguration rather than expansion.

    Antonio Joli, Vista de la calle de Atocha, ca. 1750.

    This approach responds to the ongoing transformation of the surrounding city. The future redevelopment of the Paseo del Prado, the renovation of Atocha Station and the progressive pedestrianization of the neighbourhood will substantially modify patterns of movement and public life. The Museum is understood not as an isolated institution but as part of this evolving urban landscape.

    Instead of reinforcing a single representative entrance, the project establishes a distributed system of access along the Prado façade. Existing openings are recovered and activated, replacing the hierarchy of one monumental doorway with a sequence of permeable connections between the city and the Museum. The intervention reflects both the rational organization of Hermosilla’s architecture and the plural condition of contemporary society, where access is understood as multiple rather than singular.

    The Museum becomes more permeable, allowing visitors to enter, circulate and inhabit its public spaces with greater freedom. Exhibition areas, services, retail spaces, cafés and outdoor environments are reorganized into a continuous spatial sequence in which movement is no longer prescribed by a single route but shaped by individual choice. Transparency becomes both a spatial and an institutional condition.

    The reconfiguration of the historic courtyard plays a central role in this transformation. Together with the extension of the external elevator cores to the first floor, it reconnects a level that currently remains detached from the Museum’s main circulation system. This new continuity allows visitors to understand the building as a whole, establishing direct visual and physical relationships between the galleries, the garden and the vertical circulation.

    Nature, light and movement become integral components of the architectural experience. The courtyard is no longer perceived as an enclosed void but as part of a continuous sequence linking the Paseo del Prado with the vaulted wings of the historic building. Interior and exterior are brought into closer dialogue through the recovery of existing spatial relationships rather than through formal intervention.

    The proposal ultimately restores an urban relationship that had remained incomplete for decades. Without altering the identity of the historic architecture, the project reorients the Museum towards the Prado, integrating it physically and conceptually into Madrid’s cultural landscape. Architecture operates here through continuity rather than addition, demonstrating that the transformation of a building can emerge from revealing the latent possibilities already contained within it.

  • Cultural Mixed-Use Building

    Cultural Mixed-Use Building

    The site occupies a privileged position in the upper part of the city, surrounded by a large public park of oaks, elms, and lime trees, and offering expansive views towards the mountains. The area is characterized by a series of high-quality modern buildings, many of them the result of international architectural competitions. This project was intended to complete that sequence, although its development coincided with the European economic crisis of 2008 and remains unbuilt.

    The program is both ambitious and inherently civic. Several public administrations agreed to consolidate a group of cultural institutions within a single building, sharing site, services, design, construction, and operational resources. The project brings together a municipal parking structure, an Official Language School, a Music School, a School of Native Language and Culture, and a City Auditorium.

    This coexistence of multiple institutions within a single structure defines the project. Constructed with restrained materials—primarily stone and stucco—and with carefully controlled openings, the building is organized as a vertical stacking of distinct programmatic bars. This configuration is intended to foster relationships between uses: visual connections, spatial overlaps, and moments of encounter between different groups of users.

    The interior is conceived as a continuous environment, where movement across levels allows users to experience the building as a shared space. Roofs are accessible at various heights, functioning as outdoor terraces oriented towards the landscape. The Auditorium itself participates in this dual condition, capable of opening or closing its stage towards the valley.

    While each institution retains a degree of formal and spatial autonomy, the building can be understood both as a composition of distinct parts and as a unified whole. The result is a collective structure that reflects a civic ambition: an architecture that embodies the idea of shared effort and common ground—a built expression of democratic collaboration.