Meet: Camps Felip Arquitecturia


Catalan practice Camps Felip Arquitecturia is going from strength to strength after shaking off the shackles of the recession


Blueprint

Who: Josep Camps, Olga Felip; plus seven staff
What: architecture practice
Where: Girona, Spain
When: Founded in 2006

Young, Spanish practices, emerging from the shadows of the recession, seem to be on the ascent. One is Madrid-based SelgasCano, which is designing this summer's Serpentine pavilion and has just completed its first building, co-office space Second Home in London, another is Girona-based Camps Felip Arquitecturia, founded by Catalans Josep Camps and Olga Felip. In nine years it has built up a consistent portfolio of elegant and dignified buildings, all defined by a sensitive stitching together of the old and the new, the site and the community, the urban environment and the landscape. As yet, it hasn't built anything outside of Spain, but that is all set to change with a house in London and a major competition in the works.

Camps and Felip first met at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) and started working on small competitions together as students, until the practice was officially formed in 2006, just as the economic crisis in Spain was coming to a head. Undaunted by the shaky state of construction in Spain, it began to pick up self-built installations and small cultural buildings in Catalonia. 'This situation has been our reality from the very beginning; we don't know yet other situations, so it is our natural habitat,' says Felip.

One of its first projects (2009-10) was a cultural centre on the site of the old market of Ferreries, in Tortosa, that restored and extended the disused market building and created a dignified, dark, grooved facade and a new public square.

Josep Camps and Olga Felip

A concern for the historic layers and context of a site combined with a limited palette of materials and the framing of new views has typified Camps Felip Arquitecturia's approach since then. Its Museum of Energy (2011), located next to the river Ebro, in Ascó, frames views of the surrounding landscape with two sweeping, concave polycarbonate-clad facades, screening visitors from the industrial eyesore of the nearby town centre.

Similarly, its swimming pool (2011) in Jesús, Tortosa, is structured around a new public space and plays with the boundaries between interior and exterior: a linear sequence of shaded areas, concrete porches and patios connect a bar, changing rooms and lobby. Another example of using a powerful, impassive elevation to define the orientation of a site can be seen at L'Aldea's Primary Care Centre (2013), along the river from Tortosa. At a new junction, between the traditional rice farms and new buildings taking shape, the centre is defined by a tall, homogenous, off-white aluminium facade that references the watchtowers dotted along the riverbanks. 'Every project can be understood as a variation of the other ones. They are overlapped in space and time. Then the same issues move from one project to the next or the one on the table beside. In the end, there is just one open project that never ends,' reflects Felip.

Primary Care Centre, L’Aldea (2013)
Primary Care Centre, L'Aldea (2013)

A string of accolades has followed, from two Young Architect of the Year awards and inclusion in the European Centre of Architecture's 40 under 40 in 2010, to representing Catalonia at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. Last year, its 80 sq m artist's studio in Girona, built in just three weeks using prefabricated wood, was commended in the Best Small Project category at Blueprint's inaugural awards. Judge Asif Khan called it 'a great achievement on such a small budget'. The practice is currently working on a primary school and health centre in towns near Barcelona, and on one of the first commissions it won, in 2006, for the Law Courts of Balaguer, put on hold in the recession.

What would be Camps Felip Arquitecturia's dream project? 'We believe that almost every project has the potential to be a dream project; then, it depends on you to make it happen.'








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