Building Collectively

“The contributors to this book share a common cultural milieu as a generation of Spanish, Catalan, and Basque architects and urbanists who emerged during a near decade of economic crisis. The crisis brought with it a collapse of the building industry, a recoiling of municipal budgets, and widespread unemployment among design professionals; it was also accompanied by signifi cant social unrest, most visibly in the 15M indignados movement.”

“Building together has tremendous potential to create not only wonderful places but also technical capacities, sustaining organizational structures, and local knowledge production.”

David de la Peña, doctorate in Landscape Architecture and
Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley

Lacol is a cooperative of architects who work in the neighborhood of Sants, in Barcelona. They work from architecture toward social transformation, using architecture as a tool to intervene critically in the surrounding environment. Using a horizontal system of labor, acting alongside society with justice and solidarity in mind.

LACOL Arquitectura Cooperativa