TC Cuadernos No 171/172: Peris + Toral 2014–2025

Architecture 2014-2025

This double issue covers, in 390 pages, more than a decade of work by the Barcelona-based studio, Peris y Toral, through a selection of projects that place collective housing at the centre of the contemporary architectural debate.

The works presented in this issue have their origins in public competitions, a field in which Peris and Toral have developed a particularly consistent career. The publication brings together his most significant works in the field of social housing and collective space, showing how regulations, far from being a limit, become a project tool, and how technique can precede form to give rise to open, flexible and lasting architectures. Intermediate spaces, bioclimatic atriums, honest construction systems and a materiality understood from its performance define a work that is committed to long-term social, environmental and cultural sustainability.

The projects are presented through an extensive collection of plans, axonometries and construction details, some reworked specifically for this edition, which allow the structural, spatial and material logic of each work to be followed with precision. The attention to detail, to passive systems, to the relationship between structure and space and to the economy of means is reinforced by three fold-outs that expand the reading of key projects.

The trajectory of Peris + Toral, founded in 2005 by Marta Peris and José Toral, has been widely recognized nationally and internationally, with awards that place its work among the most relevant in contemporary architecture. These include the RIBA International Award 2024, the DETAIL Prize 2024, the Erich Mendelsohn Preis 2023 and the CSCAE Spanish Architecture Award 2022, as well as having been finalists for the Mies van der Rohe Award on several occasions. These recognitions are the reflection of a rigorous and committed practice, in which research, construction quality and the social dimension of architecture are integrated in a coherent way.