Painter Studio for Arranz-Bravo by Garcés De Seta Bonet

Situated on the northern face of Tibidabo mountain overlooking Barcelona, the new studio space for the Catalan painter Eduardo Arranz-Bravo is a two-story concrete building set within a sloping site close to the artist’s house.

Architects: Garcés – De Seta – Bonet Arquitectes
Location: Vallvidrera, Barcelona, Spain
Photography: Adrià Goula

The new building is designed for a sole activity: creation, an introspective and solitary experience, just as the painter told us. This led us to handle the volume compactly, with a uniform exterior design –layers of insulation and clear stucco in an expressive continuance of walls and cover– to establish a feeling of familiarity with the natural surroundings in an unobtrusive manner.

The interior is a fluid and multiple concrete cavity – a direct result of the monolithic structural construction concept and the search for harsh and naked spaces that serve the artistic work that takes place inside.

The plot of land is sloping, with an abundance of trees on the northern face of Tibidabo, and is adjacent to the painter’s house. The small building has the largest –12 m x 13.5 m–, and emptiest painting studio possible, a result of the meeting between the prismatic volume and the land, a workshop for sculpture and a store for the painter’s own work.

The studio, a space with no views, receives light primarily from a large skylight in the meeting point of the four sloping roofs that irregularly finish the definition of the space from the crowning horizontal line of the 5-metres high periphery walls.

A staircase, positioned unobtrusively to one side so as not to break the unity of the studio, leads to the lower floor with less clearance height (3.5 m-). The rear space closest to the retaining walls is designed for storing works of art and the front area, which is a sculpture workshop, opens fully, with a large scored fissure with a landscape layout, onto an outer work terrace offering views of the dense greenery that distinguishes the place.