Workshop “Feeling the Place” in La Vila

DATE

24.07.2025

This week, the students of the MArch Advanced program are immersed in the workshop “Feeling the Place”, a unique experience taking place in La Vila, the research and creative space of RCR Arquitectes in Olot.

This natural setting, carefully preserved and designed as a space for thought, allows students to explore a more sensorial and profound dimension of architecture.

The aim of the workshop is to move away from traditional analytical methods and enter a way of working that begins with direct experience: listening to silence, observing light, walking through the landscape. Through manual exercises, graphic records, and collective reflections, students develop their ability to read the context with attention and sensitivity, integrating body, mind, and emotion into the design process.

La Vila, conceived as a laboratory of ideas, is a space where architecture and nature are in dialogue and balance. In this environment, learning moves beyond the conventional classroom and becomes an experience — a way of reconnecting with the essential, as proposed by Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta, founders of RCR and winners of the Pritzker Prize in 2017.

This workshop is part of the MArch Advanced program’s commitment to offering an international education that is not only technical and strategic, but also poetic and experiential. The experience at La Vila allows students to adopt a new way of seeing and designing, understanding architecture not only as construction, but as an act of presence in the place.