COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Type: Renovation

  • Surgical Block

    Surgical Block

    The intervention understands the existing Hospital of Bidasoa as a constructed field rather than a finished object. Its accumulated layers, organized through a system of wings and courtyards, contain the capacity for transformation. The project operates by subtraction:a precise removal within the built mass creates the space for a new presence to emerge.

    Part of the original volume is carefully hollowed out. This void becomes preparation. Within it, a new structure is introduced, light, metallic, and autonomous, establishing a direct relationship with the ground and remaining independent from the pre-existing building. The encounter between both systems is defined by proximity and dialogue.

    This inserted body accommodates the surgical program as a compact and efficient core. The operating suites are arranged in a clear sequence, dimensioned for contemporary practices and open to evolving demands. Mechanical and electrical systems are integrated within its depth, forming a coherent infrastructural layer.

    Positioned at the geometric and functional center of the complex, the new volume organizes connections with the surrounding hospital fabric. Flows of patients, staff, and resources converge with clarity, and circulation becomes continuous and structured by proximity.

    Above, the metallic framework unfolds as an inhabited infrastructure. Its depth accommodates installations while modulating space and light. Openings carved into this structure introduce natural illumination into preparatory areas, bringing orientation and calm to the sequences of care.

    The surrounding courtyards gain renewed intensity. Preserved and amplified, they become active landscapes defined by soft surfaces and continuous paths, integrating exterior space into the daily experience of the hospital while extending its capacity through a precise and reversible new layer.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Multi-Use Garden

    Multi-Use Garden

    The project is defined by a linear system that mediates between landscape, program and movement. Rather than occupying the site as a compact object, it unfolds along it, establishing a continuous relation with the topography and existing conditions.

    A simple structural order organizes the intervention, allowing different uses to coexist within a unified framework. This system ensures clarity in both construction and use, while maintaining the capacity to adapt over time.

    Circulation is understood as a primary architectural element. Access, movement and occupation are integrated into a continuous sequence of spaces, where interior and exterior conditions are deliberately blurred.

    The project avoids singular gestures, relying instead on repetition, proportion and controlled variation. Through this approach, it achieves a precise balance between presence and integration, operating simultaneously as infrastructure, landscape and built form.

  • Loft I

    Loft I

    Located in a 1955 concrete frame building, one of the first to flank the section of Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana laid out north of the Nuevos Ministerios, Loft I is the renovation of a dwelling completely disfigured after decades of interior demolition and use as an office.

    It is conceptually linked to the European avant-garde, which defined the modular, flexible and multipurpose space, and literally to the North American industrial transformations, which defined the loft as a way of recycling disused spaces and inaugurating a life without geometric or hourly divisions.

    The old terrace and the original façade had completely disappeared, but the renovation recovered them and carried out meticulous restorations of elements from the 1950s, such as the unique lacquered steel railing and ceramic tiling of various qualities and shades, which were restored to their original appearance and position.

    The project received in New York the international award “Best Sustainable Apartment Renovation Architecture in the World 2024”.

    Even laundry and grooming: Loft I naturalizes domestic functions. It leaves nothing hidden. It opens up the space and dilutes the boundaries of the house, including the interior limits. It entrusts the entire dwelling to the architecture, not just a reassuringly photographable part.

    In Loft I, production, rest, gathering, city air and vegetation, art and body do not reside in separate rooms.

    The materials used avoid the old separation between inside and outside, public and private, as in turn does the organization of the dwelling. The programmatic continuity is reflected in the material continuity.

    It blurs the boundaries between housing and city, in the same way that urban and domestic activities intermingle today. The objects and voids that make up the interior, its transparent, black or colored planes deployed three-dimensionally, the floating garden of the house, the trees in the street, the city, form a continuity through scalar leaps that become gigantic as the multiple others that make up Madrid participate.

    Loft I defends the reality of the contemporary user, for whom connections, genders and generations are fluid and positive qualities. It is a material and real attempt to build inclusion.

    The floor plan is designed to maximize the use of natural light, eliminating the need to use electricity for lighting at any time of day. Differences in the angle of incidence between winter and summer warm the house in the cold months and reduce direct sunlight in the summer

    There is a permanent pressure difference between the opposing facades of the building. Due to the location of the openings and the internal continuity, natural cross-ventilation is immediate at any time of day or night. The design of the external carpentry and the absence of internal hinged elements keep the openings stable and therefore the ventilation and healthiness of the air.

    Once again, the absence of partitions is a real tool for sustainability and energy efficiency. The fireplace, which in the 1950s was a wall in the representative room of the house, has become a freestanding and central element. Its contribution can now be used throughout the loft. The black mineral wool, placed horizontally under the ceiling slab, acts as an insulator and heat distributor.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Penthouse Refurbishment

    Penthouse Refurbishment

    The project transforms a penthouse apartment for an elderly couple by simplifying its spatial organization and improving continuity. Located in Huesca, the dwelling opens to two contrasting landscapes: the Pyrenees to the east and the desert to the west.

    The intervention removes an internal wall that previously separated both orientations, freeing the center of the house and creating a continuous living space connected to the terraces. Light becomes the main structuring element, crossing the interior throughout the day and reinforcing the unity of the space.

    A system of adjustable aluminium slats regulates light and temperature, while cross ventilation between façades ensures environmental comfort. The project focuses on minimal means to achieve spatial clarity, environmental performance, and a stronger relationship with the surrounding landscape.