TC 176: GCA Architects

This issue brings together, across 326 pages, forty years of work by the Barcelona-based studio GCA Architects, founded in 1986 by Josep Juanpere and Antonio Puig, through a selection of nineteen works —most from the past decade and a half— spanning its practice in corporate, hospitality and residential architecture. An architecture that integrates building and interior design within a single project, attentive to materiality and detail, and a trajectory that grew with the Barcelona that emerged from the Olympic years to become a benchmark practice.

Located mostly in Barcelona, the works span almost every typology and scale: from the corporate towers —Puig T1 and T2— to office buildings such as Cuatrecasas or Aragó 330; from The Mirror Hotel to housing on Passeig de Gràcia 93 or Ausiàs March 49; from cultural venues and foundations —Castell de Peralada, Fundació Bofill— to St. Paul’s School and the Sea Towers in the 22@ district. Large-scale works of an urban character that have absorbed the new demands of construction —energy efficiency, renaturalization, passive climate control— to the point of making them part of their method.

As is customary in the series, each work is presented with extensive graphic documentation —plans, sections and construction details redrawn for the occasion— together with photography.

The introduction by critic Magda Mària places GCA within the lineage of the finest twentieth-century Catalan architecture and highlights its skill, rationality and aesthetic sensibility. The issue closes with an In Memoriam to Josep Juanpere, co-founder of the studio, who passed away during its preparation, with a text by Carlos Ferrater.