Josep Lluís Mateo Architects, Barcelona

Josep Lluís Mateo Architects, Barcelona

Josep Lluís Mateo Architects founded in 1991 in Barcelona, is under the leadership of the principal Josep Lluís Mateo and his partner Marta Cervelló since 1995. Josep Lluís Mateo combines professional and academic activities. Barcelonian by birth (1949), he graduated in architecture in 1974 at the ETSAB and doctorate from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 1994. Since 2002 he is permanent Professor at the Architecture Department of the ETH Zürich. He has also lectured at numerous European and American institutions. He was editor-in-chief of the magazine "Quaderns d'Arquitectura i Urbanisme" from 1981 to 1990.

Josep Lluís Mateo Architects tries to connect building activity with strong interest in all the pragmatic items to intellectual research. Besides the new Bundesbank headquarters in Chemnitz (Germany) and the complex of the International Convention Centre in Barcelona, the office is developing several projects: a tourist-complex and a convention centre in Locarno-Ascona, (Switzerland), an office tower in Eurolille area (France), the Auditorium and the Contemporary Museum of Art in Castelo Branco (Portugal), the new headquarter of the Government in Haarlem (Holland) and the enlargement of the office building for the Company PGGM in Zeist (Holland) besides to several housing development in Spain and a couple of leisure developments in China (Hangzhou and Qingpu).

The exhibition seaks to analize the Deutsche Bundesbank
New Headquarters in Chemnitz and the International Convention Center in Barcelona. Although beginning in different moments and under various conditions both are finished at the same period of time. The two built projects are being confronted by their diverse strategical situation related to the location, the political and economical opportunities, the changing European context and the interests of the developers. Both are projected in Europe and manifest terms of global and local interests, but in a different ways. They are presented from the architectural approach and its conceptual beginnings to the precision of the development of the construction process and architectural detailing of the working site. There is explained the dynamics of the project, the various tempi, that always happen along every architectural project.

New Bundesbank Headquarters in Chemnitz, 2004 "
In a place with a dense and traumatic history, the proposal addresses the issue of permanence and solidity, and also of nature, understood in a palentological way as the petrification and crystalline solidification of organic matter."

International Convention Centre in Barcelona, 2004
To confront the "big fact" of convention centers, Josep Lluís Mateo Architects have turned exactly to the memories and fantasies about this site. This complex will be neither a monolith nor a shaped coherent object but rather a assembly and calibration of different forces into an uneasy balance. 

Welcome:
Kristin Feireiss, Berlin
José Rodriguez-Spiteri, Spanischer Botschafter, Berlin
Dietmar Girst, Deutsche Bundesbank, Leipzig
Hans Kollhoff, Berlin

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