Barberí Laboratory

Barberí Laboratory is the Spanish design team’s own studio, made by rehabilitating an old foundry. Rather than restoring the building to a finished state, the architects kept its worn stone walls, rusted remains and the vegetation that had grown inside.

New elements are few and precise. Sheets of glass and thin steel frames are slipped between the old walls, closing off workspaces while keeping views to the ruin and the garden. A long glazed workroom runs beside a planted courtyard, and models and drawings fill tables under the old roof.

The studio works as a laboratory in the literal sense: a place to test ideas about time, matter and landscape at full scale. Meetings, lectures and workshops take place in the larger halls, among the traces of the factory.