A Career in Five Projects: Jaume Bach

Jaume Bach Núñez, PhD, is a professor at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), where he has taught Composition and Architectural Design since 1970 and has been a member of the Degree Project Jury. He began his professional activity in 1968, combining architecture and urban planning. In the 1980s, he cofounded the studio Bach-Mora with Gabriel Mora and, in 1998, the studio Bach Arquitectes together with Eugeni Bach.

He has been a visiting professor at various public institutions and schools of architecture in cities such as Hannover, Urbino, Turin, Vienna, Bucharest, and Dublin. He has given numerous seminars and conferences in Spain, as well as internationally in Europe and America.

His works include the Banco Sabadell Headquarters, the Casp 74 Residential Building, the New Altar of the Parma Cathedral (winner of an invited international competition), the Casa del Tíbet Cultural Center in Barcelona, the Raventós i Blanc Wineries, the Telefónica Building in the Olympic Village, the Olympic Field Hockey Stadium for the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games, the Illa Fleming housing blocks, the Railway Station of the Autonomous University of Bellaterra, the Operational Centre of Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, the Sabadell Station, and the extension of the Corachán Clinic.

His work has been exhibited in Spain’s major cities, as well as in the most important international forums, including the Lisbon Triennial of Architecture, the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, the Essen Deubau, the AEDES Gallery in Berlin, Expotecnia in New Delhi, the Deutsche Arkitektur Museum in Frankfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, the Architectural League of New York, Europalia in Brussels, and in various editions of the Buenos Aires International Architecture Biennial.

Throughout his career he has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the European Architectural Heritage Award, four FAD Awards, three FAD Opinion Awards, being nominated on twenty-five other occasions. In the field of design, he has received four Brunel Award Commendations and the ADI FAD Silver Delta Award.

Among other distinctions it is worth mentioning the Gold Medal at the Buenos Aires International Architecture Biennial, the ASCER Prize—on two occasions—and several selections at the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (BIAU).

His work has been published in more than 600 publications, including the most prestigious national and international books and magazines, as well as in articles and interviews in the Spanish and international press. There are five extensive monographs published about his work, including the latest, Jaume Bach, architect, published in 2025 by Puente Editores.

When I finished my degree in 1969, I decided to combine architecture with design and urban planning projects. I also started my academic activity with Oriol Bohigas, with whom I had been collaborating since the early ’60s, preparing the database of modern Catalan architecture ahead of the Congress of Catalan Culture that was hosted at the ETSAB. I believed that expanding my field of vision would help broaden my knowledge of the reality where I should intervene.

In those years, I carried out several studies on green and leisure spaces in Barcelona in collaboration with Dols, Millet and Páez that received an award by the International Union of Architects (UIA) and that served as the basis for the development of an improvement strategy that culminated in the 1992 Olympic Games.

At the beginning of the ’70s, I designed my first project of some importance: the Residential Building in Castellar del Vallès, with a clear reference to the realism of Martorell-Bohigas-Mackay, although with an emphasis on the new social behaviors that began to appear during those years. However, the greatest activity took place in small single-family houses that always pose new problems to explore. Among these first projects are the Tello House, a “house within a house,” and the Olèrdola House. They are projects that show the concerns of a young professor, now part the Department of Projects of the ETSAB directed by Rafael Moneo, and that translate the readings of that time, from Venturi to Rossi among others, into buildings.

Olèrdola House
Barcelona
1980–1981

Architect: Jaume Bach
Design Years: 1975–1976
Construction years: 1980–1981

The Olèrdola House is located in a residential area in the upper part of Barcelona, where the steep slope of the land contributed to the creation of a small square, a cul-de-sac, that creates a pleasant and unusual space in such urban developments. The project takes advantage of part of an existing building that faces the square and removes the main building at the back of the plot, creating a large and sunny front garden. The podium or base on which the house sits is used as a garage and auxiliary services. The access, which is obvious from the garage, could also be approached from the private passage that limits the plot to the west. It introduces a dual position in the conception of the house, which also extends to other areas such as inside-outside, covered-uncovered, stylistic choices such as the use of the more traditional sloping roof forms, or material choices between masonry and drywall construction.

A large awning protects from views and keeps privacy. During the construction of the project, I agreed to test the use of a concrete block that, by law, require a compact construction. The diagonal vision and the change in height in certain areas would allow me to improve it.

The use of drywall construction in three significant and specific areas— “entrance,” “porch,” “bath-pool”— gives the feeling that the house has been modified over time and introduces the image of the passage of time into the work. This is the first and most complete evidence of a way of projecting that not only addresses purely rational aspects but also wants to introduce aspects of a poetic and cultural order about how to inhabit a house.

With this work I was awarded my first FAD prize and received a wide recognition that confirmed my position of critical continuity with a modernity that had to expand its fields of interest without giving in to postmodernism, which rightly criticized it but created an incongruous stylistic approach. On the other hand, and as I have pointed out, it is worth insisting on how the project points out novelties, such as the consideration of the bathroom-pool space, one of the spaces added with a different technology. It is the space for the toilet, for the functional, but also for pleasure and play under a green pergola in this interior-exterior, cabin and garden.

In the mid-1970s, Gabriel Mora proposed to participate in a restricted competition for a ski apartment project in the Pyrenees. We won the competition and carried out the Lavert Apartments in Cerler, with resonances to Aldo Rossi, and a second more compact apartment project, the Basibé Apartments, a short time later. It was the beginning of a collaboration that was established during the ’80s and that lasted until the end of the ’90s. From this period are the first public institutional commissions: the L’Alzina School, the Bellaterra Station at the Autonomous University, the renovations of the stations of the Ferrocarril network of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the remodeling of the public squares in the Gràcia neighborhood in Barcelona, several public schools and other facilities such as the Josep Maria Jujol School, the Sports Center on Perill Street, the Palau Macaya Cultural Center, the Telefónica Building at the Olympic Village or urban studies such as the Pla Dalt Vila in Badalona.

Towards the middle of the decade, two similar commissions coincided in the Penedès wine region a short distance away from each other, one a public project—the School of Viticulture and Oenology in Espiells—and the other a private one—the Raventós i Blanc Wineries.

Raventós i Blanc Wineries
Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, Barcelona
1986–1988

Architects: Jaume Bach, Gabriel Mora
Structural Engineering: Robert Brufau
Building Services: Albert Vilanova
Surveyor: Joan Ardèvol
Design Years: 1985–1986
Construction: 1986–1988

In the mid-1980s we were commissioned to design new wineries for cava in the Penedès region for the new company Josep Maria Raventós i Blanc in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, the great wine region near Barcelona. The project had to sit continuously with the warehouses of the old company—now in the hands of others—which had been built by the great modernist architect Puig i Cadafalch at the beginning of the twentieth century (1895–1915). That was both for reasons of access as well as to keep a beautiful centenary oak as an emblem of dedication to the land for generations, and as a public good, not only for private enjoyment.

An initial conceptual approach was to design a large ellipse in its two foci that would contain the oak tree and a large well: what emerges from the earth and what is made underground and offers its product. This idea evolved, but it maintained the contrast: a circular, evaluative, penetrable geometry, and an orthogonal one for the spaces of work and rationality.

This arrangement allows the complex to be extended and to show good integration with the landscape, while offering views to all areas of the vineyards and the emblematic Montserrat Mountain. It also allows continuity and the future underground growth, as well as gravity’s work.

In this way, the complex is proposed as the conjunction of various typologies: workshops, warehouses, laboratories, offices, performance, and tasting rooms that organize outdoor spaces with their aspects of relationship, access, celebration, work, etc. The comprehensive treatment is achieved with brick as a primary material. Poured concrete is used for roof elements, with small interventions being completed with stucco or ceramics.

Olympic Field Hockey Stadium
Terrassa, Barcelona
1989–1991

Architects: Jaume Bach, Gabriel Mora
Structural Engineering: Robert Brufau
Building Services: David Oromí, Jesús Fernandez
Surveyor: Lluís Fullola
Collaborators: Carles Escudé, Pep Zazurca, Josep Maria Domènech
Design Years: 1989
Construction Years: 1989–1991

The selection of Barcelona in the mid-1980s as the host city for the Olympic Games gave rise to a new type of commissions that transcended the usual ones, both in the public and private sectors. Strictly related to the Olympic Games, we intervened in the definition and remodeling of one of the three superblocks of the Olympic Village, where we proposed new typologies, as well as an exhaustive construction strategy that would allow a rapid definition of the construction and the better coordination of the various agents that should intervene.

At the same time, the studio received two iconic commissions: the Telefónica Building for the Olympic Village and the Olympic Field Hockey Stadium in Terrassa.

At the end of the ’80s, we were commissioned to design the Olympic Field Hockey Stadium for all the competitions of that sport in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. It was about transforming a football stadium, of which only two galleries were built on a plot of about 14 hectares, into a set of auxiliary pieces such as training grounds, indoor courts, and new changing rooms. Those would contribute both to facilitate Olympic competitions, and later, to offer the first-class facilities in this sport to the city of Terrassa, a city that had a long commitment to the sport recognized worldwide.

The land, with very good accessibility, is located on the northern edge of the city in an area with a landscape oriented towards the mountain of Sant Llorenç del Munt that protects the city from the north, and with a distant view of the iconic Montserrat Mountain. The proposal, in line with the necessary economic containment, consists of burying the existing stands and obtaining, by modifying the terrain, an emblematic classic arena. It is a project that models the landscape and shows its geographical fixed lines without adding “construction.”

Four iconic lighting towers designed in unstable balance at the four corners of the stadium provide a necessary public image and mark protected spaces under the flight of their projecting slabs: entrances and small service areas for the complex. The modification of the tension pillars of the structure of the tribune allows the underground continuity for the necessary auxiliary spaces: changing rooms, services, etc., without altering the access roads and give rise to a new façade as a stoa for the complex.

Altar and Transept for the Parma Cathedral
Parma, Italy
2008–2009

Architect: Jaume Bach
Consultants: Pere Casanova, Joan Bada
Design Years: 2004–2005
Construction Years: 2008–2009

At the end of the twentieth century, we dissolved the Bach-Mora partnership under which we had been operating since the mid-1980s and formed, with my son Eugeni, the studio Bach Arquitectes. One of the first commissions, the result of winning a restricted international competition, was the new design of the altar and transept of the Parma Cathedral in Italy, which coincidentally took placed at the same time of a similar project of the studio at that time: the Tibet House, a Tibetan cultural and spiritual center in Barcelona’s Eixample.

The project of the Parma Cathedral is summarized in the design of four elements: the altar, the ambo, cathedra, and the auxiliary seating. This was done to adapt this space to the liturgy after a renovation in 1983 that, despite solving many problems, wasn’t entirely satisfactory.

Having the privilege of intervening in a monument that has so many centuries of history, crowned by the sixteen-century paintings by Antonio da Correggio dome, was an enormous—and very satisfying—commitment. We had to reconcile the scale of the interior of a cathedral with the necessarily restrained intervention of a few pieces that had to be significant despite their small size.

We, therefore, decided to design these elements with a unity of materials, and a diagonal arrangement that allows the spatial relationship between them, as well as with the space of the chancel and the nave. The final position of the elements allows for visuals that, a priori, and due to the section of the nave, were difficult to achieve.

These different pieces are all treated with the same material: cast bronze plates hand-polished with wax and burnished with a graphite-based liquid. The plates are 10-mm thick and engraved in relief, like delicate works of goldsmithing, with biblical texts referring to the function of each object in Latin, Greek, and the main modern languages. The altar maintains the sarcophagus from the twelfth century, which stands on two bronze platforms. Above the sarcophagus, a piece of white marble finishes the entire piece.

The ambo is rethought from its fixed position and its double function towards the nave and towards the choir of the cathedral. Thus, it offers two possibilities of operation, with two different images: towards the nave, as a reference to the tablets of the law, and towards the choir, more open, with a single vertical piece.

The cathedra, located in opposition to the ambo following a diagonal that passes through the altar, had to be arranged elevated so that it could be seen—and could see—from the nave, located at a lower level due to the section of the cathedral. Therefore, the cathedra includes two steps of its own design that are next to the two steps that raise the choir from the transept. This element is also made in all bronze, except for the parts closest to the body, which are covered with a silk velvet fabric in the color “giallo Parma.” Next to the cathedra, two more chairs with the same formal and material unity accompany the bishop.

Banco Sabadell Headquarters
Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona
2010–2012

Architects: Bach Aquitectes / Jaume Bach, Eugeni Bach
Collaborator: Francesc Vargas
Structural Engineering: BOMA (Robert Brufau)
Building Services: PGI Group
Project Management: LKS Studio
Landscaping: Espinàs i Tarrasó
Access Engineering: SBS
Design Years: 2009–2010
Construction Years: 2010–2012

The creation of Bach Arquitectes with my son Eugeni gave a new impetus to my career with new commissions and others in progress, such as the Illa Fleming in Sarrià or a new block of apartments in the Poble Nou neighborhood Barcelona’s Eixample.

But the most important commission, due to its significance and difficulty, was the large office building for Banco de Sabadell, which, after several projects and extensions, ended up being the bank’s headquarters in Sant Cugat del Vallès.

In 2003, we completed the Landscape Building, a 200-meter-long office building that follows the course of the B-30 highway in the geographical center of Barcelona’s metropolitan area, right at its intersection with the highway. The project consists of a longitudinal bar of offices that follows the geometry of the site and an industrial warehouse for archiving located at the back and connected to the offices by four bridges elevated in relationship to the access floor of the building.

This linear arrangement made it possible to subdivide the complex and assign a part of the warehouse to each part of the office, given that, originally, the project was intended to be rented to several companies.

Banco de Sabadell, the ultimate client of this project, saw the opportunity to move a large part of its offices into the new building. Years later, they commissioned a modification and extension to turn the entire complex into the bank’s new headquarters.

The new proposal consisted of demolishing the existing industrial warehouse to concentrate its buildability into a new volume of offices, freeing up a large, landscaped area in the center of the site that becomes the entry point to the different buildings of the new headquarters.

Under this central green space is the service floor of the complex—auditorium, cafeteria, rest room, gymnasium, training rooms, commercial area, bank office, infirmary—with direct connection to the office buildings, and below this, two floors for parking connected at level with the existing ones.

With this strategy, we managed to completely change the character of the place, from a building in an industrial area to an office complex surrounding gardens.

The fact that the new volume of offices is concentrated in a small tower not only frees up green space but also sets the tone for how the bank’s future building growth should be on the adjoining plot, also owned by Banco de Sabadell.

The office building

At the southwest end of the freed up central space—now the new gardens—we erected a small office tower—a ground floor plus five floors—that houses the new management offices of Banco de Sabadell.

The tower is placed on the site cantilevering slightly above the access ramps to the parking, showing its desire to move away from the center and give back more open space. It is also making the main entry point to the building more evident and showing the different orientations on the plot between the buildings and the circulation. The office block is designed to get the most out of each floor and the best ratio between circulation and service spaces in relationship to the landscape office space. To this end, the structure is very clear, with a circulation core displaced from the center to offer differentiated spaces and a structure of concrete pillars on the perimeter. The façade is made up of a zigzagging skin of large, expanded metal in dark grey metallic lacquer, with superimposed openings delimited by large aluminum frames that give depth to a façade that is otherwise very thin.

This façade functions as a double skin with a ventilation chamber. The expanded metal in a zigzag pattern allows the entire building to be protected from solar radiation, generating a naturally ventilated air chamber that allows for greater thermal performance. An aesthetic quality is added to this functional quality, since the different inclinations of the façade generate shadows and nuanced changes depending on the angles of sunlight, causing the façades to vary their appearance throughout the day. When the light falls perpendicularly, the façade is seen as a continuous whole but, as the light falls laterally, it becomes a set of vertical slats of varying thicknesses to which the rational order of the windows is superimposed.

These, in turn, generate another game that adds complexity to the façades that are, otherwise, very simple. They are based on very deep frames that include retractable blinds from the inside, helping to control the solar impact inside the offices and offering another element of variation from the outside.

The apparent depth of the windows also generates a feeling of greater comfort from the inside, suggesting that the façades are very thick and solid when, in reality, they are very thin and light elements to achieve a large surface area inside.

The service floor

The space just below the central garden becomes the functional heart of the entire complex that includes the new office building and the existing one.

It is an underground floor of just over 86,000 square feet that aims to provide a spatial quality and a generous influx of natural light that redeem it from its underground condition. Strategies such as creating exits to the outside at the level of the floor, creating openings in the floor plan at a few strategic points with generous patios, or generating a double-height space in the access staircase to open up views from the underground floor to the outside, help to achieve this.

Most of the public services of the new complex are concentrated on this level, such as the auditorium, the rest room, the new cafeteria, the gymnasium, the training rooms, the bank office, and the shops, as well as more technical spaces for the proper functioning of the whole complex.

All of them can be accessed in three different ways. The main access is through the entrance located on the ground floor from where the primary staircase and main access to the services is accessed. There are also two entrances at the level of the access floor to the existing office building located on floor -1 in relation to the one now projected, so that they communicate at level with the existing restaurant, the garden area, and parking of this part of the complex.

The central garden

In the area where the industrial warehouse linked to the linear office building previously existed, a large, landscaped square has been built that becomes the heart of the new headquarters.

This garden not only functions as a space for relaxation, outdoor activities, or simply as a visual space to which all the offices open, but from a functional point of view, it becomes the access point to the offices. It is a space of circulation and relationship that articulates the entire complex.

To achieve this goal, we changed the use of the existing bridges from meeting spaces to new entrances to the existing building. These bridges previously connected the offices with the industrial warehouse on the ground floor; now they become entrance doors and meeting spaces from the new gardens.

Finally, and beyond this detailed description, the assignment allowed us to insist on some aspects that we consider fundamental in our practice:

• The approach to natural light that is abundant in all areas of the complex, especially in the underground parking, a solution that led to its adaptation as a standard by the City of Sant Cugat.

• The desire to design façades with windows instead of the banal curtain walls, which keep the plan balanced with half wall/half opening, and that provides a very comfortable sense of “protection” to the users.

• Our commitment to the tactile values in the materials used that generate a certain domesticity and affective proximity.