OAB: Office of Architecture in Barcelona by Carlos Ferrater
Actar, 2015
Hardcover, 320 pages

Nine years ago I reviewed Synchronizing Geometry, a monograph on the Carlos Ferrater Partnership that came out of an exhibition on the firm at IIT in 2006, the same year OAB formed. The very first project encountered on opening that book was the Barcelona Botanical Garden, completed in 1999. Likewise, OAB (an updated version of a 2011 monograph also from Actar) places the same project on the beginning pages, illustrating the importance of the project in Ferrater's career and giving the firm a chance to explore its evolution in the last decade and a half (the firm expanded it seven years ago). The Barcelona Botanical Garden, which consists of a network of triangles laid across the Montjuïc site, is my favorite OAB project, and it is one that clearly inspired other projects; take the AA House (aka Origami House), for instance: square rooms and courtyards in plan resolve themselves as folded triangular planes at the roof.
Looking at OAB's work in the updated monograph in this manner, a number of formal strands can be grasped: triangulation, as in the BBG and AA House; carved volumes, as in the Azahar Group Headquarters and Granada Science Park; grids, which are appropriate for corporate buildings, such as the Mediapro Building; the layered facades of Bilbao's Riverside and other apartment buildings; and the occasional articulated box, such as the Vila Real Public Li...