Professional pivots

Most people don't make decisions on impulse. I'm not referring to deciding whether to order a beer or a wine when the waiter catches us off guard. I'm talking rather about those decisions that will set a direction in our lives: staying or breaking up with our partner, choosing our profession, choosing “the” place to live or “the” company to work for.

Shortly before the pandemic, a couple of commissions with some special characteristics came our way:

One of them involved the reconception of an apartment in Barcelona's Eixample. One of the members of the couple has suffered from Parkinson's since a very young age and needed us to pay special attention to the functioning and materiality of their home to address the limitations imposed by a disease that advances without mercy.

The other was a house at the foot of Cornudellas de Montsant, for a young Filipino-American couple, avid climbers, who had chosen Alforja as their place in the world, and had just bought two hectares in the middle of the countryside, without any urban services at the edge of the plot.

In both cases, the project's priorities were not a particular formal style, nor choosing “trendy” materials and equipment, nor finding the best price, nor maximizing the number of square meters possible…. Although all of that was present, the main priority was to achieve healthy homes that provided physical and emotional well-being to their occupants.

We have always understood architecture as a tool to improve people's lives, and intuitively we seek to achieve the comfort of our clients through the design of space. But these projects made us feel the need to train ourselves more intensively in concepts of bioconstruction, neuroarchitecture and bioclimatic architecture, in the search to achieve more efficient results when designing.

For all these reasons, applying this shift in our studio was not an impulsive decision. It was not solely down to these two projects. The interest has always been present, but in some way Casa Mood and Alforja gave us the final push to enroll in the Master's in Architecture and Health at Escola Sert, among other ways of delving into the interesting field of healthy architecture.

After so many years in the profession, we will continue to take an interest in creating architecture that is balanced in all its aspects (formal, functional, economic, cultural) and evocative, but we are beginning to walk a path that adds nuances and advantages. And that shouts to the four winds that Architecture ultimately serves to help us be happy. We leave you a presentation video so you can learn a little more about what this is all about.

Thanks Mateo & the Octagón team for your involvement in the video. Thanks Terence and Juvelle, Enric and Mieria, (much more than clients) for your generous participation.