The remarkable restaurant project of the renowned Torres brothers has been devised as a temple for the senses and also as a hub of expertise.
Between tradition and experimentation, Roca aimed to express this innovative concept by shaping charismatic bathroom spaces. The innovative lines of the Insignia faucets and the Beyond basins were rounded out by the modern practicality of the Hotel’s accessories in a gloss metallic finish.
Why they trusted Roca
The bathroom spaces of a restaurant need to live up to the creativity and prestige of its gastronomic offer but also to the intensive use of its visitors. The choice of these Roca collections made it possible to go further in terms of shapes while providing at the same time the latest technologies for savings –such as the Cold Start system of the faucets- or the more practical solutions for safety and durability of the accessories for public use.
Right from the start Sergio and Javier Torres defined what they were after in a few words: “More than a restaurant with a kitchen we’d like to create a kitchen with a restaurant.” With this clear and ambitious premise in mind and with the acquisition on their part of a former industrial shed of almost 800 m2, which it was necessary to completely overhaul, the project could begin.
In situating the kitchen in the epicenter of the restaurant the old concept is resurrected of the café-theater, places where diners enjoy a show while they eat. Here, though, the show will consist of the actual preparation of the dishes they will be tasting. Added to which, thanks to having chosen an industrial shed as a great container, the experience diners have of personally living through a “performance” is emphasized. Being in such a huge shed is like being present in a television studio or a modern theater.
Joan Guillamat
Thanks to the collaboration of the Roca company the floor is ceramic. As it should be, the way traditional kitchens have always been, like the one the brothers cooked in with their grandmother Catalina when they were small. The unit is of a special format designed specifically for the Restaurant. An extended flooring using the same material for every area, the most elegant ones and those of the personnel. It was essential to understand the integral nature of the intervention.
We decided the bathrooms would be the exception to the rule: there we introduced Iroko wood, which makes them very comfortable. An atmosphere was sought that was contrary to the central space, one more typical of a ship’s cabin and not a huge industrial shed.
Joan Guillamat
The main protagonists will always be the client, the chef, and the dishes. As for the others, the less they are noticed the better. Concessions—the minimum. To that end we availed ourselves of a single decorative element of great size: a big black and gold curtain that occupies the whole side wall and is backlit, making it possible to play with the light in a magical way. An indispensable ingredient in architecture, light will be what we speak of next.
In this obsession with eliminating the superfluous and unnecessary there insistently appears the presence of the color black in almost the entire restaurant. Black emerges as the counterpoint to the white of the plates, the tablecloth and the uniform of the chefs, which acquire their protagonism thanks to blanketing all of them in an indefinite matt-black space. Moreover, the color black enables us to do the same with the light as with the décor. Thanks to it we can illuminate what is interesting. The rest will remain lost in the immensity of the shed. As in a theater or concert hall where it is the stage, the actors or the musicians that are illuminated.
Hereon in there begins a magical game, which thanks to the presence of glass which provides reflections and to the darkness of the main room and the presence of mysterious hanging lights there occurs what the brothers have ultimately defined as “the premises of our dreams.”
Joan Guillamat
MATERIALITY Once the organization of the space has been defined, an element of great importance comes into play for ensuring that the culinary experience occurs with the degree of comfort and convenience that it merits. In order to try and nuance the undeniable fact that we are dining in an industrial shed a series of materials are introduced that tone down and even manage to produce a sort of ambiguity between being, initially, in a cold space of huge proportions as opposed to an agreeable, warm and welcoming space. The tables with tablecloths, the cushioned seats, and even the presence of the occasional carpet will temper things and provide comfort as well as help to control the acoustics of the room.
Joan Guillamat
THE LIGHT For the ambient lighting of the main room we worked with the designer Pete Sans on the creation of what we called “the clouds,” lamps that precisely sought to fulfill several objectives. Through the presence of hundreds or thousands of small lights the lamp evokes a starlit space, and thanks to the reflections in the glass panels of the room and in the skylights a multifarious magical effect is produced. The lamps are situated strategically at a constant height of 2.55 m, which permits the construction of an imaginary or virtual ceiling in which all that is above appears, through being painted black, to recede or to disappear. Thus the ceiling is not clearly seen but only intuited.
Joan Guillamat
THE THRESHOLD And we will end at the beginning: the entrance door and the façade, which we knew would become a threshold separating the space of the imaginary from the urban reality of the barrio of Les Corts in Barcelona.
To that end, after thinking long and hard about what we ought to do, we decided to respect the interior form of the shed, with its gabled roof, and to reaffirm the formal archetype of a house. Secondly, the brothers conveyed the importance to us of the four seasons of the year, of working with seasonal products. So we decided that the best way of representing this would be via nature. In concrete terms, to do with a wood and how the seasons of the year transform it.
Joan Guillamat
For years Carlos has followed the work of the painter and muralist Regina Saura, who in some of her recent exhibitions has focused on the representation of trees and woods. So we asked her to participate in the project and to create an artwork for the façade to do with the idea of a wood. We think that Regina’s façade manages to transmit the message of seasonality due to the different tonalities of the leaves (in the colors of winter, summer, autumn and spring) and at the same time conveys the contrast with the reality of the urban context. We can understand the act of entering Cocina Hermanos Torres in two ways: by crossing a wood in the city or acceding to their new house in a wood. In any event the façade is a threshold, a place in which we abandon the exterior space of the street, which once crossed enables us to live quasi-imaginary experiences. All this thanks to the organization of the space, to the use of materials, and to the play of light. But above all, the interior space becomes a dream when savoring the latest creations of Sergio and Javier Torres.
Caption
Material Used : 1. Kitchens: Cocinas Rull 2. Pavement: ceramic, ROCA sanitarios 3. Ceramic surfaces kitchen: TPB 4. Lighting: IGuzzini 5. Glass: Tvitec 6. Metalwork: Talleres V.Montón 7. Wood carpentry: Fustería Ollé 8. Aluminum coatings: Alucoil 9. Aluminum profiles: Reynaers 10. Façade painting supply: Akzo Nobel 11. Golden curtain supply: Baumann 12. Manufacture and supply curtains: Fader 13. Venetian blinds: Best-Form 14. Chairs and seats: Andreu World 15. Bar stools: BD Design 16. TV screens: Samsung
1. “To follow the development of Ferrater’s work is at once to sense the absorbing of outside influences and the emergence of crucial themes. His commitment to a concise functional approach and a vocabulary founded on structure place him, broadly speaking, within the ‘rationalist’ lineage, although the utilitarian is clearly conceived as a basic discipline in the search for an art of proportion, space, color and light.”
William Curtis (1989)
2. “When we saw his 1980s buildings, the l’Estartit houses, the ones in Barcelona’s Calle Bertrán, and the sports center in Torroella de Montgrí, there was always a relaxed way of organizing the floor plan, of setting out the spaces and of utilizing multiple sightlines; there was a skillful and even astute way of getting the most out of low-cost materials and ingenious and simple technical solutions.”
Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Tiempos modernos” [Modern Times] in Carlos Ferrater, COAC/ACTAR, Barcelona, 1995
3. “And so the experience of the three blocks is strictly urban, as in the Plaza Real in the historic city center, as a result of the varying size of the horizontal and vertical fissures, which group the different enclaves around a single great opening for each apartment. These at once private and public interiors confer on it the quality of a unique interpretation of the city block as a historic contextual unit, together with a potent, austere and eloquent contemporary instrumentality.”
Miguel Ángel Roca, Arquitectura del siglo XX. Una antología personal, Summa Libros, Buenos Aires, 2005
4. “The extended set of experiments the Ferrater team has carried out on the Ensanche puts the enormous adaptability of the geometric conditions of the city blocks proposed by Cerdà to the test. It also demonstrates their unwavering commitment to innovation, to showing how new programs must find new typological responses but, above all, to concerning themselves with how a different breakdown of the city block can institute distinct compositional forms. And this on the basis of the forms that define special morphological choices which, notwithstanding their singularity, maintain a high level of coherence with the monumental typological deployment the Ensanche is the historical bequest of.”
Joan Busquets, “Redescubriendo las morfologías del Eixample” in OAB. Carlos Ferrater & partners, ACTAR, Barcelona, 2010
5. “Carlos Ferrater distils the ideas and themes of his architecture with aphoristic precision; without rhetorical exhibitionism he isolates the thinking that goes with each building in order to express it synthetically and with maximum concreteness. Time and again, the primary nucleus, generator of each project, grows out of the command of the relationship between space, volume and light, and not from intentions bearing on language or style, which lead to logical and natural conclusions. Trust is not placed in theory but in the reasoned description of a procedure that assigns fresh elements of his personal search to each work. The question reality asks of the architectonic construction is the indispensable prerequisite for confronting each project.”
Eleonora Mantese, Carlos Ferrater. Editorial Munilla-Lería, Madrid 2000
6. “[…] With today’s technical means and the enormous variety of resources and materials that are available it is extremely easy to succumb to stridency and ostentation. That is why a beautiful and at the same time sober building is to be welcomed. A genuine exercise in sobriety. Spectacular architecture has never interested me. Not just because it often involves an odd mixture of technical boastfulness and banality, but mainly because building itself sits badly with the very essence of the spectacle which, to become so, requires a limited length of time. A spectacle can please us greatly, but always on condition that it lasts but a short time. A building is too lasting for such a purpose. […]”
Ernesto Páramo Sureda, Parque de la Ciencias. Granada. ACTAR, Barcelona, 2008
7. “The vernacular cities and towns of Europe as well as the work of architects like Gaudí, Coderch, Barragán, Chareau, Aalto, Lewerentz, Corbusier, Fehn and others continue to hold our attention, despite the passing of time.
The great architect Luís Barragán said, ‘Any work of architecture created without mental serenity is, from my point of view, a mistake and when the serenity has joy it is definitive.’ In this case the winning project, the Triginer House, is in keeping with Barragán’s words. [...] This house, above Barcelona, has a flexible patio and spaces aimed at capitalizing on the perspective views and the breeze. The architect has created a platform on the first floor that articulates the main spaces and makes the solution appear simple in the most complex of locations. At all events, simplicity is the other face of complexity. [...] This is a modern piece of work that passes the test of time. It is a serene, sober, rational building, worthy of the Década Prize.”
Glenn Murcutt, Presentation of the Década Prize. 31 May 2006
8. …appears and in reality is a normal building: no epidermal gesticulating or supposedly environmentalist gadgetry: its entire conception of sustainability resides in the project design or is hidden deep within. It is, and seeks to be, a normal building because what ought to be habitual is the correct cardinal compass bearing, the choice of materials in relation to their extraction/production cost, use and anticipated duration, the utilization of rainwater and gray water, the preeminence of natural light and energy efficiency, and the extreme comfort of the user. But this unusual normal building is perceived as being exceptional….”
Ramón Folch. “Arquitectura pertinente”. El Periódico, 25 May 2007
9. “There are some people who believe that the more the schools of architecture teach their students to analyze reality and its conditioning factors, the less these students learn to plan for it. Others, however, consider that a good knowledge of the medium, its environment and its history, is the basis of good design. Carlos Ferrater is an unconditional supporter of the first option. It bothers him to know all the intimate details of a place before planning for it. The analysis of reality is a dead weight around the designer’s neck. Form, like metaphysical thinking, has to be generated ‘a priori.’ Notwithstanding that, his project designs are, it seems, the outcome of a profound knowledge of the place they are intended for. The geological foundation, the lie of the land, the light and shade, the vistas, the urban structure all for part of a given project. [...] And so, if the architecture appears to spring from the very essence of the environment, of the landscape, when the project is the landscape itself the latter acquires the status of architecture for its ability to project form, order, structure.”
Bet Figueras. Carlos Ferrater
