Type: Education
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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.
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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.
