Location: El Prat de Llobregat, Spain

Design Team: Coll-Leclerc

Area: 8356 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: José Hevia

Design Features: The Josefa Puigpelat “Teresina” Residence and Day Care Centre stands in El Prat de Llobregat within metropolitan Barcelona. Instead of arranging 108 rooms along institutional corridors, Coll-Leclerc divides them into nine small household units and gathers these within three staggered volumes. The result is a compact neighbourhood of passages, indoor squares and gardens. Completed in 2025, the building provides 8356 m² of floor area alongside 1241 m² of landscaped gardens.

Each household accommodates 15 residents in 11 single rooms and two double rooms, supported by living, dining and rest areas. Bedrooms gather around a naturally lit indoor plaza and connect to south-facing terraces, replacing long corridors with a sequence of recognisable shared rooms. Beside the facade, every single room includes a 3.20 by 1.80 metre living zone where residents can place familiar furniture, allowing a standard room to become a personal home.

The three offset blocks increase facade length and improve sunlight, outlook and access to outdoor space. Day care, shared services and ground-floor households extend into the gardens, while one third-floor unit gives way to communal terraces and urban allotments. The building remains compact in winter but becomes more porous in warmer months, when galleries, shading frames and layered edges support a slower movement between interiors, sheltered outdoor rooms and landscape.

More than 60 percent of the site is given to permeable ground and planting. Rather than forming a single ornamental courtyard, the landscape interprets three environments associated with El Prat: an agricultural garden to the south, an orchard to the north and a riparian garden to the east. Native, low-water planting and productive gardens bring local agricultural memory into everyday activity, social contact and sensory experience.

Timber-lined communal rooms, pale facades, deep overhangs and continuous frames reduce the apparent scale of a large care facility. Coll-Leclerc translates person-centred care into spaces that can be occupied, adapted and remembered: the room preserves individual identity, the household creates a familiar social circle, and nine households form a small community connected to the city. Public welfare is expressed through sunlight, furniture, terraces, planting and carefully judged distances between people rather than through monumentality.

Design Team: Coll-Leclerc was founded in Barcelona in 1996 by Jaime Coll and Judith Leclerc. Mallorca-born Coll studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture, completed a doctorate and undertook Fulbright postdoctoral research at Columbia University. Montreal-born Leclerc studied architecture at McGill University and the Barcelona School of Architecture. Both founders have maintained long-standing teaching roles in Spain and Canada alongside practice.

The studio combines professional work with academic research across public space, housing, social infrastructure, landscape and urban systems. It is particularly interested in how emerging social programmes can respond to changing ways of living, working with public authorities, engineers and environmental consultants to carry spatial ideas into durable construction and everyday use.

Coll-Leclerc treats health, social responsibility and climate adaptation as interconnected design concerns. Its work pursues lower energy demand, environmentally responsible materials, self-adapting comfort and biophilic experience, while maintaining that architecture should serve the broadest possible public and remain flexible enough to evolve with its users.

The practice has received the City of Barcelona Architecture Award, a Spanish Architecture Biennial Award and Spain's National Public Housing Award, as well as two AVS awards for public housing in Catalonia. Its work has appeared at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the studio was selected by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei for the Ordos 100 project.