COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Type: Education

  • Public Language School

    Public Language School

    Public Language School establishes a direct and precise relationship with the IES Cabrero building, not through superposition but through distance. The new volume separates and shifts, defining an intermediate plane that transforms the existing roof into a habitable platform: a transitional space that measures and qualifies the relationship between both architectures.

    This operation dissolves the condition of mass and constructs a lighter presence, almost suspended. The southeast façade is shaped through two successive cantilevered setbacks that step the volume outward, breaking down its profile and avoiding a compact reading over the existing building. This gesture introduces a depth that refines the scale and establishes a passive system of solar control, where the building’s own form casts shade onto the lower levels and regulates the intensity of light.

    At the upper level, two solar protection systems are arranged as filters, forming a translucent layer that softens radiation and produces a more homogeneous and diffuse light within the classrooms. The north façade, by contrast, is configured as a lattice of rotated openings that seek a precise orientation, capturing a constant, diffuse light that avoids shadows and provides a balanced interior environment.

    The building is organized around a central void that articulates circulation and visually connects the different levels. This space, partially occupied by the staircases, is lit from above through skylights, allowing natural light to penetrate deep into the interior and reinforcing the spatial continuity of the whole.

    The project is not conceived as an autonomous object, but as an operation of adjustment and balance with the Cabrero building, where distance, light, and material construct a new relationship between both architectures.

  • Diagnostic Center & Medical School

    Diagnostic Center & Medical School

    The Diagnostic Center and School of Medicine will be a leading center for research and clinical care. The Center will be one of the first in Europe to systematically incorporate robotic medical laboratories.

    This hospital facility has more than 400 specialized consultation rooms, robotic laboratories, a diagnostic center, a surgical suite, and specialized medical units.

    The facility also houses a School of Medicine with robotic classrooms, a medical library, and a Conference Center that can accommodate 800 people.

    The center features 1,200 naturally ventilated covered parking spaces and a station on the Bilbao metro network. Both facilities will improve connectivity with the rest of the city.

    Despite its large scale, the design establishes a network of pedestrian walkways and gathering areas, both indoors and outdoors, connected to the surrounding landscape and the new gardens.

    Its construction represents a challenge in sustainability and land restoration. The Center is being built on a degraded site that was used as a landfill for excavation spoil during the 1980s. The new facility will restore the area both environmentally and urbanistically.

  • 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.

  • Carvajal Residence Renovation

    Carvajal Residence Renovation

    In 1968, Javier Carvajal designed the Sagrada Familia residence in the Puerta de Hierro district of Madrid. Conceived as a student residence with a library, common spaces, and a chapel open to the public, the complex is organized around a cloister that opens onto a garden of large trees. Completed in 1969, the building is defined by a series of abstract black-brick prisms that appear to float above one another and over the landscape, forming one of the most significant examples of Carvajal’s architecture.

    After more than fifty years of intensive use, the building had accumulated technical deficiencies, improvised installations, and pathologies caused by water and terrain. The intervention addresses these conditions through a careful process of restoration and upgrading, with the aim of preserving the architectural integrity of the original project while improving its performance.

    The strategy focuses on the precise repair of both construction systems and spaces, alongside the integration of new technical installations. Particular attention is given to ensuring that these updates remain invisible, allowing the original spatial qualities and material expression to remain legible.

    The refurbishment extends to the guest and priest rooms, which had become functionally obsolete. Each unit is treated individually, updating finishes, services, and exterior elements such as terraces and planters, while maintaining their relationship with the garden and natural light.

    The project restores the initial balance between architecture, landscape, and use. The building recovers its original atmosphere: spaces once again open, luminous, and connected to the garden, where material, light, and vegetation reinforce the quiet intensity of the ensemble.

  • 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.

  • 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.