On 21 September, Catalan architect Toni Gironès inaugurated the 18th edition of the Barcelona Ceramics Chair at the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture with a speech entitled “Topografías en el tiempo. La experiencia de la arquitectura” (Topographies over time. The experience of architecture). Vicenç Sarrablo, the chair's director, presented him and described Toni Gironès as one of the exponents of light architecture. “To take advantage of what already exists is an attitude in architecture that Toni Gironès has always been able to exploit very well,” he highlighted, while defining the architect as “the Jujol of our time”. 

Toni Gironès then began his speech, about his project called “Espacio Transmisor del Túmulo Dolmen Megalítico de Seró”  built in 2012 in Seró (Artesa de Segre, Lleida). It is a small cultural multi-purpose facility, which won the FAD Prize for Architecture in 2013 and was one of three projects chosen to represent Catalonia at the 14th Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2014. 

He explained that the space meets the conditions that inspire his professional practice. These include the activation of the pre-existing, the use of vegetation as architectural material, the optimisation of natural resources, the central role of the material and the passage of time. “I cannot understand architecture without the idea of inhabiting it. Abstraction is necessary for the process of a project, but for it to be architecture, that abstraction must come back to reality,” he pointed out. And he sent a message to the students: “A good project planner learns to doubt increasingly well”.