Over the course of a week, the students were divided into groups and worked on a total of three cubes, each with a different concept: a symbolic cube, a cosmic cube and an anthropological cube. The aim was to carry out an in-depth study of concepts such as material, light and shape in the structure of the cube in order to uncover the essential elements of architecture.

Group 6, one of the two winning projects, used the three cubes to narrate the course of human history and human emotions, and the transition from “the cave” to “civilization”. The group, which was supervised by teachers Pepe García-Ruiz and Nico Orlando, used the first cube to represent “a space isolated from the outside, introspective, one of solitude and thought”. They used the second cube to represent the need to socialize, “the clash of ideas, conflict”, and the third to represent the intangible or mystical, which “hovers above the humanized and earthly, the eternal question, the origin of the project, light”.

Meanwhile, the other winning group, led by María Framis and Carolina Pérez, represented the concepts of light, matter and time. The group aimed “to match the pace of our lives to the movement of the vast machinery of the universe and find the starting point for the understanding of geometry and space”. Thus, the students and teachers raised questions such as “Does light exist without time?”, “Is creation itself more beautiful than its evolution and erosion?”, and “How many dimensions do we perceive and how many are unknown to us?”

The central theme of this year's edition of the Vertical Workshop was the work of Eugènia Balcells, which is based on a language whose fundamental parameter is light, as it enables the relationship between space and time to be experienced, with reference to the object in question and everyday life. Her work often includes a mixture of semantic, symbolic and cosmological elements.

The Vertical Workshop was launched when the ESARQ School of Architecture was first founded 15 years ago, and from the outset it has benefited from the involvement of world-renowned architects, including Carlos Ferrater, Carme Pinós, Emilio Tuñón, Luis Moreno Mansilla, Winy Maas, Karl Chu, Bernard Cache, Mike Weinstock and Dennis Dollens.