Talking with Ferran Grau Valldosera is an opportunity to explore the connection between education, critical thinking, and professional practice through what he calls prior domesticity: all the conditions that allow us to feel at home within our neighborhood before we even step into our own homes. An architect, PhD, and professor of architectural design and urban planning at the ETSA URV, he is co-director of the journal Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme (issue 272) and co-founder, together with Nuria Casais, of GrauCasais Architects.
As part of the Neighbourhood interview series by Girbau LAB, this conversation with Ferran explores how architecture is being conceived today, how we are educating future generations of architects, and which values are emerging in the practices of young professionals when designing collective spaces and the infrastructures that shape everyday life.
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Good morning Ferran. We would like to start the interview by exploring one of your facets, that of a teacher at the Reus architecture school. In your day-to-day work with your students, do you work on design thinking about shared spaces and services or are we still too tied to the traditional housing program?
Good morning, thank you for inviting me to Neighborhood Interview Series. At the Reus architecture school we have a very special feature, and that is that we teach urban planning and projects together. This means that we do not only think about isolated architectural objects, but we connect the territory with the community, collective and public space.
In the third year, within the architectural project subject, we work on collective housing. Here we explore in depth the cooperative model and the different forms of community housing. For us, it is essential to teach how to design the city and architecture from the premise that you are designing, first and foremost, the conditions for creating community.
Historically, domestic infrastructures such as laundry have been treated as secondary pieces or have been directly hidden in social housing projects. Do you think this sensitivity is changing?
Laundry has experienced a significant change linked to sanitation and new improvements in the use of grey water. Traditionally, the washing machine has been located between the kitchen and the laundry room, and it has not always been an easy piece to fit in with the dignity demanded by social housing.
In addition, there has always been a certain cultural taboo around hanging clothes: it has tended to be hidden or covered. But design is evolving. Now we can find projects that place these functions in much more dignified spaces, directly taking advantage of the roofs of buildings as well-resolved meeting places.
And what vices or difficulties do students encounter when facing this transition between the private sphere and community services in the building?
We always ask students to draw an urban and territorial drawing where the boundary between the public and the private is clear. We do this first in the analysis phase of the current state and, later, in the project proposal.
In this exercise, we can very clearly see how this dividing line is changing. The conceptual ideal is for the common space to appear, which is precisely the intermediate zone between the street and the home. It is a concept that cooperative teams here in Catalonia, among other professionals, have developed a lot: the idea of a public or private space managed or lived collectively. It is positive that these boundaries are blurred. The only point where we must be very careful is to avoid a classic of the city: the times when the private agent is appropriating an investment that the public administration has made for the benefit of the community.
In your research career you have been to international architectural centres, such as Switzerland. Are there any cultural differences in how other countries manage this step towards community?
Yes, the experience in Switzerland, for example, is very direct. There the physical line between public and private space in the city practically does not exist; you can approach the edge of a house and you will not find fences, although the landscape and the code change.
As for the management of the laundry, in the house where I was installed the laundry was completely communal. It was located in a well-ventilated semi-basement, sometimes connected to a patio, and self-managed by the residents themselves. This is a purely cultural reality, in the same way as ecological awareness. I saw superbly structured recycling there years ago; the students there have it so taken for granted that they incorporate it naturally into their projects from day one.
What are the values and voices that move today’s younger architects? What is their commitment?
In this new generation there is a very powerful conceptual change in the way teams and cooperatives work: they do much more collaborative work than what we did. Community awareness is already born from the university classrooms themselves.
In addition, they have a fully integrated concern for climate change. Their focus at the university is to apply passive environmental control systems and integrate them into the essence of architecture. Awareness of resources and the reuse of materials, the famous circularity, is also emerging strongly. Although in Barcelona this process of constructive circularity is just beginning and still needs to be implemented more in the classrooms, young people are already fully aware of it.
There is certainly a tension here that I would like to explore. Young people leave university with this community and regenerative outlook because the education they receive guides them with these values, but in many cases, they encounter professional practices and a real estate market that does not necessarily value it. How is this mismatch managed?
In many cases, reality surpasses fiction. In fact, it is important to remember that much of the new wave, including the leading cooperative teams that we have today in Catalonia, was born precisely as a response by the profession to a period of severe economic crisis after 2008.
I believe that a very large field of work is now opening up: the need to build much more housing in Catalonia is being considered and this will force us to review many architectural and regulatory archetypes. Even in the worst of times, architects have the obligation to review ourselves. I want to be optimistic in this sense, without at any time ignoring the fact that the reality of the market is very harsh.
In your projects such as the Àtria Residence or the Magatzem Housing, you have precisely explored the limits of the shared fact. What dilemmas appear when breaking with our individual habits?
The Àtria Residence is the first center in Catalonia specifically designed for adolescents and young people with intellectual disabilities. The main challenge of the project was to build a real “house”. And for us, building a house meant carefully designing the common spaces: the patio, the swimming pool, the dining room or the living rooms. In a residential system, the value of living is found precisely in the collective character and in how the building is linked to the immediate environment. The institutional archetype had to be changed.
In the case of the Magatzem Housing, the starting point is different: it is a small building to take care of a piece of land in the Camp de Tarragona. There is no more generous act in the design than the fact that the main room is, in fact, the kitchen and the fireplace, with a bed that simply unfolds when needed. The spatial priority is given to the place where people meet on the weekend to work in the field and have lunch. The collective spirit is what structures the entire floor.
In Neighborhood Interview Series we talk a lot about “good neighboring”. Sometimes, when design tries to impose socialization in a rigid way, spontaneity is lost. What ingredients do you think architecture needs so that neighborhoods emerge naturally and humanly?
For years, I have been thinking about a concept of my own that I call prior domesticity. It consists of designing shared spaces before they are inhabited with the same comfort conditions that you would provide inside a home; that is, thinking about lobbies or community areas so that they have natural light, good ventilation and corners where people really want to stay, beyond the doors of their homes.
It is a very simple principle: if you provide these transitional spaces with quality environmental conditions, people end up opening up to dialogue spontaneously and making the spaces their own. There are recent examples of social housing in Catalonia where this phenomenon is clearly visible.
What are the principles of this new sensitivity in social housing that is being created in our country?
It is about expanding the section of community and circulation spaces for things as simple as being able to place a table, a chair or some plants. It is about giving more dimension to the intermediate space. This, obviously, also requires co-responsibility and care on the part of the neighbors, because the common areas must be managed and cared for by mutual agreement.
The pandemic and other factors have highlighted that the classic housing regulations, which often required very rigid tile sizes to be followed, must be reinterpreted. Architecture must advance in parallel with our new social needs.
Now I would like to explore your facet as co-director of urban planning and architecture magazines. This makes you connected to the contemporary culture of the profession in a special way. How do you see this attention to shared resource management and collective architecture, is it a fad or a consolidated paradigm shift?
Theory is indispensable because it allows us to reflect on the what we do, but if we look at the current Catalan context, we will see that we are doing a lot of theory directly from practice. I would say that it is not a fashion, but a pure necessity.
In Catalonia we have a very high level of technical and social commitment on the creation of ideas and theories. Historically there have been utopian theories, but right now we are working with theories of the present, very close to material reality. Very different models of living are beginning to consolidate and more will come; our job is to theorize on these real works to learn how we can continue to respond to the new demands of society, which are very different from those of ten or fifteen years ago.
And what are the major trends or factors of change that will mark the coming years?
The determining factor will be re-circularity I believe. It is still little implemented because the process is economically very expensive, but the need to transform and regenerate existing buildings —whatever their use— to convert them into housing will be a constant. We must make the architectural program more flexible to respond to fast-paced and changing life models.
And if we look at the future of education in twenty years, how should architecture be taught in a world increasingly digitalized and mediated by Artificial Intelligence?
This is a complex question that worries many of us. In a context where it seems that all knowledge is rapidly being diluted in the networks or can be delegated to automatisms, I believe that for the future of the discipline it will be more important than ever not to lose the craft of knowing how to draw buildings very well as a way of thinking-doing and knowing what already exists.
And, above all, we can’t lose the constructive fact, knowing how things are materially built. Fortunately, in our cultural fabric the value of detail and good construction is once again highly valued, and this is excellent news. The architecture of the future will require dialogue, mutual involvement and a great deal of care in materiality to continue to be a real and solid service for citizens.
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