Signature · Architecture · Barcelona
b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos
From Barcelona to Itaim: the Spanish practice that has worked alongside Jean Nouvel, David Chipperfield and Toyo Ito, and which sums up its own approach in a single phrase — "well-mannered singularity".
Who they are
Fermín Vázquez trained as an architect at ETSAM, the Madrid School of Architecture, in 1988, with a master’s degree in property development management from the Polytechnic University of Madrid the following year; he also studied at ETSAB, in Barcelona. In 1997 he founded b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos together with Ana Bassat, with offices in Barcelona and Madrid and work in around a dozen countries. It is a practice that combines highly demanding contemporary architecture with the execution rigour of a large firm — a trait Vázquez himself points to as the reason the work is recognised as innovative and reliable at the same time.
Much of the practice’s reputation comes from large-scale, highly complex co-authored projects: the Agbar Tower and the Reina Sofía Museum with Atelier Jean Nouvel; Barcelona’s City of Justice and the Veles e Vents building, built for the America’s Cup, in Valencia, with David Chipperfield Architects; the Fira Towers, in Barcelona, with Toyo Ito Architects. Alongside these are the projects the practice signs on its own — the Mercat dels Encants market, in Barcelona, and the Spain Pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015. The work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris and MoMA in New York.
In São Paulo, the practice arrived through Huma, a São Paulo developer that made the meeting of authorial architecture and small scale its method, and which commissioned it for the tower of Forma Itaim, with Felipe de Gerone as co-author. The plot was narrow and restrictive, and it is from that constraint that the building’s slenderness is born: a ventilated façade of large-format glazed ceramic panels on the east and west faces, which take the greatest solar load, and deep balconies to the north and south, where the views lie. The practice regards the tower as one of the works that best represents it — Vázquez cites it alongside the Mercat dels Encants and the Milan Pavilion.
Language
- Style: contemporary with constructive precision, with “well-mannered singularity” as a declared programme — standing out in a sea of undifferentiated skyscrapers without resorting to stridency.
- Materials and brand: a ventilated façade of glazed ceramic in large-format panels on the faces with the most sun exposure; deep balconies on the faces with views, which provide shade without blinds; slenderness of the volume taken as a design principle, not as a constraint of the plot; natural light brought into the parts of the building that are normally blind — the core, floor lobbies, lifts.
- Awards: two RIBA Awards, one World Architecture Festival Award, four ASPRIMA-SIMA awards, the Emporis Skyscraper Award and the European Prize for Urban Public Space. In Brazil, Forma Itaim won the International Property Awards 2016-17 in the high-end residential development category for Central and South America and, in 2019, was voted by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat the best skyscraper in the world in the under-100-metre category.
Landmark works
- Forma Itaim tower, in Itaim Bibi, São Paulo.
- Mercat dels Encants market, Barcelona.
- Spain Pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015.
- Agbar Tower and Reina Sofía Museum, with Atelier Jean Nouvel.
- Barcelona’s City of Justice and the Veles e Vents building, in Valencia, with David Chipperfield Architects.
- Fira Towers, in Barcelona, with Toyo Ito Architects.
- Lleida Airport and Torico Square, in Teruel.
