A Conversation with Bajet Giramé

[Originally published in Bauwelt 24.2024]

This year’s Manifesta is being held for the first time throughout a large metropolitan area. This is timely, as the Barcelona art scene, responding to real estate pressure, has largely abandoned the city and relocated to smaller neighboring towns in the periphery, which is precisely also where many young architects are getting their career starts. Bajet Giramé, a couple of young architects who live and work in a warehouse in the former industrial district of Poblenou, are a good example of an emerging practice in the Catalan capital. Like so many young architects today, they not only design and build but also teach, research, write, and curate. I met with Pau Bajet and Maria Giramé to discuss their multidisciplinary practice, and the first thing I asked them is what it’s like to wear so many different hats. Isn’t it tiring having to change hats all the time?

PB: Architects have to wear many hats today. Much of what we do may not seem directly productive, but it does help us to understand reality. Teaching and research keeps our thinking fluent and forces us to articulate ourselves and to make our ideas communicable. Writing forces us to do things in a more rigorous way. Our different activities feed off one another in the end.

Yes, I say, but we have more architecture biennials than ever today, and more exhibitions and conferences than ever, and meanwhile there’s a housing shortage. Aren’t discursive events a distraction from the more urgent and primary matter of an architect’s work?

PB: Yes, but distractions can spark new ideas and inspire our work. When we’re stuck on a design matter and switch to other kinds of endeavors, the solution to the design issue often shows up unexpectedly. We sort of enjoy distractions.

Distraction is a symptom of the digital age, I suppose. What about the housing you are building then? Is it inspired by distractions?

MG: Two recent housing competitions we entered resulted in two very different projects. For the town of El Prat [where Barcelona airport is located], the building envelope was pre-established by planners, and so the project became mainly about the tectonics of wood balloon frame construction. For the town of Montgat [on the other side of Barcelona], we had freedom with respect to building typology, and so that project became about a symbiotic and porous relationship between dwellings and the landscape setting.

PB: We like to design social housing where we would like to live. In El Prat we could use balloon frame because the given envelope was only three stories above ground floor. The wood joists are exposed in the ceilings, something for which we had to fight.

MG: In the end, acoustics and fire safety determined many of the details, so it was important for us to maintain visibility of at least some of the balloon frame, an unusual construction method in Spain for large buildings.

PB: It was important to create an awareness, a genuine feeling that the building is constructed of wood.

I then ask B&G if what’s happening in the metropolitan area is different from what’s happening in the city center in terms of architectural projects.

MG: The periphery of Barcelona is the future of this city. It’s the only space where the city can expand somewhat, so it’s where people are moving in search for new opportunities.

PB: During the Olympic preparations of the 1980s, Barcelona said “let’s monumentalize the periphery” because it was a kind of undesirable place. The eighties attraction to the periphery and the terrain vague was somehow a result of over-aesthetization. We now view this area differently. Now there’s perhaps a more genuine effort to make it a place of coexistence, where more care is given to cultural, political and ecological interrelations.

I mention how the center of Barcelona is increasingly becoming a place for expats and digital nomads to live and work and ask for their thoughts on this transformation.

MG: The betterment of the periphery is indeed a way of making it more attractive to these people too. But there’s a part of it that we might have to embrace. When we lived in London, where we both worked for David Chipperfield, I enjoyed being surrounded by people from all over the world. I think it’s good to coexist with other cultures in the city. Of course, there is a gentrification phenomenon that the city needs to address. But hopefully Barcelona is always going to be a welcoming place.

PB: The fact is that Barcelona is a magnet for people from around the world, and we can’t just close our borders. We don’t want to go back to a smaller and more closed-minded society. Yes, we have to deal with problems such as gentrification, which as architects we can suggest tackling this by investing more in public and cooperative housing. If you look back at the last 40 years, we have actually built a lot of social housing, but what happened to it? Much was given away in a sort of public lottery —somehow an inheritance from the Franco dictatorship— only to end up on the free market. Currently we have only 2% social housing in Barcelona, maybe not even that. Luckily, in the past few years there’s been massive criticism, and thanks to that greater awareness, today’s new social housing is mostly being built to rent, not to sell.

I then ask about the beautiful campground that these architects have renovated on the Tarragona coast.

PB: The Alfacs campground renovation project began in 2016 or so. Wisely, the client didn’t come with a closed brief, but asked us to undertake open studies, from which we started long conversations. Construction could only be done outside of tourist season, and so it became a gradual transformation of small interventions taking place over many years, only in wintertime. It is a slow process, which is an idea that we like: it becomes over time. We thought of it as a small city full of diversity: you have gathering, intimacy, contemplation, shade, open air, greenery, terraces, and even a shoreline!

MG: The initial trace of the project is a topography of old and new terraces built with water washed concrete. Rammed-earth buildings emerge from these terraces, with narrow service pavilions that are intended to turn everyday tasks into pleasing holiday activities, while two larger central buildings crowned by pitched roofs offer grand interior rooms for communal uses. Inhabiting the terraces, we designed 24 prefabricated bungalows, using wood balloon frame. There’s a variety of typologies, yet always with a shaded porch of equal size facing the sea. The in-between and intermediate spaces are very important in a campground, and there are lots of mature trees that we are respecting. It’s a Mediterranean garden that we worked on together with a landscape architect. The coast is very irregular and the site is narrow, so when they designed the original camping plots they couldn’t do it in a typical “parking lot” fashion. This campground is one of the earliest built in Spain, from the late 1940s. The trees were planted then, probably without a plan, so the place is very organic and accidental, which is a quality we appreciate.

Talking about a beautiful costal landscape brings up the controversial issue of Barcelona’s airport expansion, which threatens the costal lagoon of La Ricarda, where Antoni Bonet built a beautiful villa in the 1960s that is one of the Manifesta locations.

PB:. Our ecological thinking is not conservative in the sense of trying to reconstitute an idealized non-hybrid natural past. We don’t think that there is a purely natural environment in that area. Barcelona’s environment has been transformed by humans over centuries, and its coastline today is not at all a natural one. The Llobregat River Delta is, in part, the result of human activity too, and the pond of La Ricarda is a small portion of it. Clearly, preserving and enhancing biodiversity in a largely damaged and urbanized delta is absolutely necessary. Yet, without a clear position in the debate, we wonder if this economical pressure couldn’t be turned upside-down: if the expansion is inevitable, would it be possible to look at the delta at a greater scale and re-design it as a broader node of biodiversity, reclaiming far more urbanized land for the use of new swamplands and ponds?

Together with a cohort of architects of different generations from Barcelona, you’ve recently won the competition to curate the 2026 UIA World Architecture Congress. What is your curatorial proposal about?

PB: The theme of the congress deals with the notion of becoming. Becoming understood as the potential to catalyze events of spatial appropriation and transformation over time. Our approach to transformation departs from a radical opposition to the notion of tabula rasa, suggesting instead slow processes of gradual change. We suggest that these slow rhythms of change are necessary to take care of pre-existing physical, cultural, political and ecological interrelations.

MG: We’re still working on it, and we currently have six lines of research unfolding from the central topic of becoming, each emphasizing different threads that deal with ecology, aesthetics, tectonics, politics, information and circularity. In addition to identifying and disseminating exemplary international practices that will be present in the form of workshops, talks and a major exhibition, our aim is to contribute with knowledge production through research by design projects specifically developed for the congress. We can’t say much more at the moment, but we look forward to talking again soon once we get the show on the road!