Opinion
Harquitectes. The architecture of memory.
There are architects who, before building buildings, build atmospheres. H Arquitectes work precisely from this (non)place: from the intangible. In the subtle relationship between memory and matter, between light and sobriety, between the traces of spaces and the people who inhabit them. Theirs is a digestive architecture, of sediment. It does not colonize places, but rather dialogues with them. And perhaps this is precisely what makes their choice to design two of the country's great museum temples (the MNAC and the MACBA, no joke) so suggestive: because their language seems incompatible with the spectacular gesture. In a time of architectures conceived to be photographed, they continue to design spaces to inhabit memory and project it into the future.
There is a strange combination of rigor and sensitivity in his buildings. The walls maintain their impurities; stains, cracks, traces of paint or eroded textures are not eliminated, but incorporated as layers of time. As if the building could remember. Harquitectes works with the memory of spaces in the same way that some artists work with matter: listening to its resistances. His architecture breathes a deep Mediterranean sensitivity, very close to light, air, earth. The brickwork, glazed ceramics, Catalan vaults, cross ventilation or filtered light appear not as historicist quotes, but as ancestral mechanisms revisited from a contemporary, ecological and silent consciousness.
Prodis steamer, interior passage cover.
To get started in their universe, it is worth visiting the Cristalleries Planell, in Les Corts (2015). Many of the firm's constants already appear there: the climatic relationship with space , sustainability understood from the perspective of passive intelligence, the ability to transform an old factory into a place of coexistence without dissolving its industrial soul. The large bioclimatic chimneys emerge as an unexpected, almost metaphysical sculptural presence. The Lleialtat Santsenca (2017), in the Sants neighborhood, also allows us to understand this way of doing things. There, beauty does not come from the impeccable finish, but from the traces of memory. The interior walls, with their visible wounds, seem to explain the working-class and associative history of the neighborhood better than any museum panel. H Arquitectes does not restore to erase time; it restores so that time can continue to speak.
But it is probably in the Vapor Prodis where his architecture reaches a deeper emotion. It is hard to find a recent building so devoid of vanity. The old factory is transformed into a space intended for people with mental disorders without renouncing either the industrial dignity of the building or the human scale that the program requires. The wooden volumes inserted into the factory structure seem like small architectures of retreat within a larger architecture of light. Everything breathes serenity: the relationship between emptiness and matter, the cadence of the spaces, the way the sun rests on the materials. There are buildings that impress; this one accompanies. And it is here that the great virtue of H Arquitectes appears: understanding that architecture is not only a formal discipline, but also a form of care.
Perhaps that is why it is inevitable to imagine that the future expansions of the MNAC and MACBA will avoid grandiloquence. It is difficult to think of a building-object that emerged from this study. Rather, we can expect porous, habitable spaces, delicate with pre-existence and attentive to the breathing of visitors. Architectures that will not compete with the collections, but will welcome them. Architectures capable of introducing silence in the midst of contemporary visual noise. If H Arquitectes has taught us anything, it is that it is still possible to build from containment, from atmosphere and from a deeply humanistic idea of space . An architecture that does not need to shout because, simply, it is.
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