GCT Arquitectes

GCT Arquitectes was set up as a practice in 1997, in Sant Just Desvern: apartment blocks and houses, public facilities, offices, public space, urban planning and refurbishment. Almost thirty years of built work and a team of around twenty-five people.

They asked us for the design, the website and the programming from scratch. With two conditions that came from the practice itself: the work had to lead — the photography, not the text — and the site had to speak four languages, because GCT was no longer working only here.

We let the photography come in at pixel zero. The home page is built work, full bleed; the header floats on top of it with no background; and the only text is four lines in lower case: espais per viure, per gaudir, per aprendre, per treballar. Four words that also happen to be the four things the practice does.

We built the site around the archive. Seventy-three buildings in a grid you filter by type — economic activity and services, housing, public facilities, public space and parking, single-family houses — and each one opens as a sequence of photographs without leaving the page. A building can carry more than one type, because buildings refuse to be filed one at a time.

We programmed the site in four languages: Catalan, Spanish, English and French, with translation built into the structure from day one rather than patched on later. That was where the practice was heading, and a site that only speaks Catalan will not get you onto a shortlist abroad.

And we rounded it off with what people check before a meeting: the whole team with roles and direct email addresses, the services, the practice’s news, and the PDF dossier one click away from the archive. One single green, kept for actions: if it is green, you can press it.