Second talk of a series on International Catalan architecture

The second session of the cycle on International Catalan architecture, co-organized by Catalonia International, Barcelona Athenaeum and the COAC Foundation through the Open Architecture Centre, took place yesterday, Monday 2 June, at the Athenaeum.

This second session was dedicated to young emerging architects and featured the participation of Arnau Vergés (Arnau estudi d'arquitectura), Arnau Tiñena (NUA arquitectures), and Julia Tarnawski (TEST studio). All of them talked about their recent works and future plans. The event was hosted by architect Moisés Puente.

Since 2004, Arnau Vergés has been working in his own studio in Olot. His work covers different scales and project typologies, with renovations and new housing projects as his main task. Vergés explained that he has the studio in an old chicken coop, quoted a poem  by Salvat-Papasseit and insisted on the concept of functionality.

NUA arquitectures is a studio located in Tarragona and founded in 2013, currently led by cousins ​​Arnau Tiñena and Ferran Tiñena. The studio's work explores the fields of architecture and design at different scales through strategies sensitive to the memory of places and the environment, seeking to provide responses to the social and cultural changes of contemporary cities and territories. Arnau Tiñena presented different examples of how transformation and recycling work in their projects, and the dialogue between new and old.

TEST is an architecture studio founded in 2022 by architects Julia Tarnawski, Albert Guerra and Adrián Jurado, based in Barcelona. Tarnawski explained how they approach projects and their working methodology, which does not exclude testing, as the name of the firm indicates.