Pati Llimona Civic Center, carrer del Regomir, 3, Barcelona – 08002

We invite you to participate in the next photo talk that will take place next Monday, July 6 at 6:30 p.m.

On this occasion, we will be accompanied by the photographer ANDREU CARRASCAL, archivist of the College of Architects of Barcelona and Catalonia. On the occasion of the declaration of Barcelona as the City of Architecture for the year 2026, the presentation aims to offer an overview of the photographic archives, typologies of images, contributions and significance of photographic heritage in the field of Architecture, both at a documentary level, as heritage and from the point of view of creating the landscape and urban space.

These connections in diversity aim to highlight the profession and photographs as an essential document that allows us to reflect, articulate and define the architecture of the past and project that of the future, also from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Since the beginning of the invention of photography, the author/image producer has generated a story, a look, that working technically and at the same time contributing his subjectivity within a relative creativity presents us with a way of seeing the architectural object. The author’s freedom can be conditioned by the needs of the client, who demands an exact photograph of the construction process, or it can be free and express itself with all the notes that the light, the framing, the focus and other tools at hand can use.

Thus, the story can be cold and technical, or deliberately creative, becoming an inspiration for trends not only in the way of taking the photograph but in the formality of future architectures, becoming the photographer the inspirer of the architect, and reversing the traditional professional roles. The story can be a more or less hidden ideology or it can simply be an exceptional witness to the disappeared architecture or the discovered architecture. The relationship between photographer and architect (without this being the only one in the photographic stories) can become so intense that the architecture of one cannot assert itself without the creativity of the other, reaching a symbiosis that we could describe as intimate. The culmination could be given by the number of architects who have produced a stimulating photograph, beyond their professional activity.

If there is a place where all these views can be seen, it is without a doubt in the Archives, true containers of stories in time of photographed architecture. The Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia has preserved since its creation in 1969 thousands and thousands of photographs that show the activity of architects from the 19th to 21st centuries, both through the photographic archives it manages, such as those of Oriol Maspons or Lluís Casals, and the photographic documentary heritage that is part of the files of architects’ offices, as well as subjective collections based on geographical, thematic or onomastic criteria, which allow it to be a reference in the explanation of architecture through the photographic image.

Before the summer holidays, we are waiting for you at the last session until September at the Pati Llimona.