Arquitectos de Cabecera

AC is an approach to the city born out of an assembly movement formed by students and professors in Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) in 2013. Working on the city and focusing on the collective, the methodology aims to bring the figure of the architect closer to the citizen and claims for a more committed role of the architect towards the city’s social structure. Its legal shape is the one of an academic group and an association. We work along collectives, associations, municipalities and universities.

AC emerged from academia as a response to three crisis: pedagogic, social and disciplinary. In academia, there is an overall lack of contact with reality and its problems. At a social level, there is a housing emergency that began with the burst of the real estate bubble in 2008. Regarding practice, we feel disciplinary traditional tools and methods have not proved sufficient to respond to the new set of challenges emerged in the last decade.

AC questions the traditional education and practice of architects by giving the social fabric the same importance than the urban structure. We aim to empower students and to act on the existing city, both morphological and social, as a field of work. We aim to work with the existing city, its problems and contradictions. Our current research topics are focused on the intersection of social movements and architecture, the role of architect in urban transformation, new forms of architecture pedagogies and the new forms of housing within open metropolitan areas.