GAD Editorial · Published · · English study · Chinese summary · Study dated 2026-10-06
HARQUITECTES gives environmental design a spatial presence. A patio can temper the approach to a room; a masonry wall can organise a plan while storing heat; a roof element can make the path of air visible. Founded in 2000 by David Lorente, Josep Ricart, Xavier Ros and Roger Tudó, the practice is particularly instructive where these roles overlap. House 1014 and the Cristalleries Planell civic facility demonstrate how climate strategies can influence the basic shape of a building.
House 1014 occupies a narrow plot between two streets in the historic centre of Granollers. Construction ran from 2012 to 2014. The main frontage was retained, while the new dwelling forms a sequence of rooms, patios and garden spaces behind it. Rather than treating outdoor areas as interruptions in a continuous house, the design gives them differentiated positions within daily life. Some are covered or partly covered, and retractable roof elements allow conditions to change with the season.
This sequence is also structural. Load-bearing masonry defines the rooms and influences the size of the openings linking them. Moving through the house means passing between spaces with different enclosure, light and thermal conditions. The front and rear access zones become places with usable depth, rather than leftover corridors between the street and the inhabited rooms. Such an arrangement makes the transition into the house an environmental as well as a social threshold.
At Cristalleries Planell in Barcelona, built between 2014 and 2016, the programme includes adult education and community uses within a triangular site. Two sides preserve the frontage of a former glass factory. Setting the new occupied floors back from the south-facing historic facade creates an atrium that brings light to classrooms and mediates between old and new construction. The retained wall therefore participates in the new building's environmental organisation.
The ventilation strategy responds to a specific constraint. Straightforward cross-ventilation between courtyards would conflict with the need to control noise between uses. Instead, vertical air paths and solar chimneys help draw air upwards. The roof's distinctive forms follow from this task. HARQUITECTES describes the combination of solar heating, height difference and wind-assisted extraction as part of a controlled natural ventilation system, alongside geothermal heating and cooling provision. It would be misleading to describe the building as relying on passive measures alone.
Across these projects, masonry is valuable because it has several jobs. It establishes room dimensions, carries loads and contributes thermal inertia. Yet mass is not automatically an environmental benefit: its usefulness depends on how heat is admitted, retained and released. Likewise, an openable patio needs an operating strategy if it is to do more than provide an attractive intermediate space. The architecture makes those relationships easier to examine because the environmental devices occupy recognisable parts of the plan and section.
HARQUITECTES offers a strong precedent for asking environmental questions early. Where should a room sit relative to a buffer space? Can air move without carrying unwanted noise? Which construction can support both the required structure and the desired seasonal behaviour? Answering those questions together can produce an architecture whose material expression follows from the work its spaces actually perform.