COLL-BARREU ARQUITECTOS

Type: Residential

  • Social Dwellings 42 Units

    Social Dwellings 42 Units

    The project rethinks the relationship between collective housing and public space. Rather than acting as a linear boundary, the building opens its ground floor through generous permeable porches, establishing continuity between the street and the shared courtyard while transforming access into a place for meeting, interaction and everyday life.

    The dwellings are organized around a central service core that concentrates all technical functions while freeing the remaining floor area as a continuous, naturally lit and flexible living space. This arrangement accommodates different ways of inhabiting and allows future adaptations without compromising the essential organization of each dwelling. Flexibility is understood not as an added feature, but as a direct consequence of the architectural organization.

    Construction follows a logic of precision and economy. A continuous metal envelope, prefabricated systems and a restrained palette of building components define an architecture where repetition, industrialization and material clarity become part of the building’s expression.

  • 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.

  • Solar Hexaprism

    Solar Hexaprism

    The interior of the prism is structured around a longitudinal circulation spine, flooded with natural light, perforated and permeable, rising up to the roof and operating as a singular spatial continuum. It becomes a large shared interior room—an unavoidable passage where encounters naturally occur. This space connects all residents with one another and with the roof above, which in turn functions as a collective infrastructure: a provider of energy, physical activity, leisure, food production, workspaces, and care.

    The roof—the fifth façade of the Hexaprisma—is conceived as a microcity that complements and extends the domestic realm. It integrates photovoltaic fields, vegetated surfaces, individual urban gardens, solariums, a continuous jogging track, gym facilities, coworking areas, laundries, rentable kitchens (both open and enclosed), dining spaces, and a wide range of environments for interaction. These programs form a topological ecosystem of shared functions. Each activity adopts a specific geometry—coworking spaces as rectangles, laundries as capsules, kitchens as half-moons, gardens as cubes—so that architecture itself becomes a catalyst for social exchange, allowing people to inhabit the roof through the pretexts of encounter.

    Valladolid, an historic city set within the Castilian plateau and the capital of Castilla y León, is characterized by an extreme continental climate, with annual temperature variations reaching up to 50°C. The site reflects this condition: a north-facing slope with undulating topography and a 27-meter difference between its highest and lowest points, located in Parquesol, to the west of the city, near significant urban facilities.

    The building takes the form of a six-sided prism that hovers above the terrain. Anchored on its eastern edge, it gradually lifts as the land descends, minimizing earthworks and avoiding retaining structures. This strategy preserves the existing landscape—its tree clusters and pedestrian paths—while allowing the ground to flow beneath the building. The resulting shaded undercroft becomes an extension of the public realm: a continuous, undulating space for play, movement, cycling, and shelter, activating communal life and reinforcing the continuity of the natural environment.

    In section, the Hexaprisma operates as a solar machine, its performance enhanced by the sixth façade. The building breathes vertically through its central spine, enabling controlled natural stack ventilation. All dwellings benefit from north–south cross-ventilation—the most efficient passive cooling strategy throughout the year. The building harnesses solar energy to generate electricity, sustain rooftop agriculture, and maintain vegetated surfaces that improve thermal performance. During summer, pressure differentials across the prism’s faces induce continuous airflow around its envelope, cooling it naturally, efficiently, and without emissions.

    Each dwelling functions as a micro-scale solar device within the larger system. A terrace-box captures and distributes light and air, while adjustable louvers on the opposite façade regulate cross-ventilation across the three primary spaces of the unit. The 215 bathrooms are conceived as compact, standardized elements suitable for prefabrication, ensuring construction quality and efficiency. The internal layout allows for both fluid connectivity and complete independence: sliding partitions and dual circulation systems enable the two bedrooms to operate either as part of a shared dwelling or as autonomous micro-apartments, each with its own bathroom, dressing area, and terrace access. The central band of the dwelling—terrace, living areas, kitchen, and entrance—becomes the social core.

    Ultimately, the same dynamic unfolds at every scale: within the dwelling, across the building, and in its relationship with the city. It is the productive tension between individuality and community, between personal identity and collective life. The built environment should reflect and celebrate this richness—grounded in choice, respect, and the shared experience of living together.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Social Dwellings

    Social Dwellings

    Seventy two social housing units together with a parking facility were conceived within a growing urban area at the edge of the historic city. The project was defined by two critical constraints: an extremely limited budget and a remarkably short construction timeframe.

    In addition, the proposal was intended as a replicable model for similar developments in nearby areas, a condition that was later fulfilled and validated through its subsequent implementation.

    The façade is composed of a single prefabricated element in white precast concrete. Its geometry allows for placement at varying degrees of horizontal inclination, generating a controlled variation across the building envelope.

    Through the repetition of this single component, prefabrication becomes both a constructive and formal strategy, ensuring efficiency, cost control, and a high quality finish. The resulting architecture expresses a dual condition, conveying solidity and permanence while remaining open, luminous, and permeable.

    Access to the dwellings is provided by elevated walkways suspended within an interior atrium. This central space operates not only as a circulation system but also as a shared social domain, encouraging interaction, encounter, and the gradual formation of a collective identity among residents.

    The undulating configuration of the façade planes introduces variation among the units, allowing each dwelling to acquire a distinct spatial character. This differentiation enriches the relationship between inhabitant, dwelling, and city.

    At the same time, the fragmented and shifting planes of the façade evoke a more atmospheric and poetic condition, recalling the enduring dialogue between mass and light, where the apparent weight of matter softens into a fluid relationship with the surrounding air.

  • 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.

  • Business District La Vega

    Business District La Vega

    La Vega de Lamiako is, in its township, the only real place of contact with the estuary. It has remained largely unused throughout the city’s history, and has remained so even in the latter metropolitan transformation, that has accompanied the transition from an industrial society into a services organization.

    This disclaimer of the city’s visual and functional integration into the river course has, on the plus side, preserved the area as the only natural river edge of sludge, and on the opposite side, led to the marginalization of a major urban area, and has therefore made difficult the relationship between the city and the estuary, which is, in terms of geography and significance, the main street of the territorial agglomeration.

    The project previews the rehabilitation of the estuary’s natural ecosystem, an important marsh for the migratory birds. In a visual continuity with the river park and the area of mud, an urban park covers the entire services and residential area. The park has dense tree areas along the Gobela river and more wide open areas close to the river park, near the estuary. The urban park will allow for people to walk, rest and play in a free environment.

    Five slender towers, with a metallic texture, are lightly supported above La Vega’s urban park. Three wooden docks, surrounded by vegetation, support three groups of smaller services buildings, with similar façades, located on the right bank of the Gobela river.

    The project has two main features: the landscaped one, towards the Nervión estuary, and the urban, absolutely geared towards the city. The area becomes a ecological structural reference to the whole metropolitan area.