A few weeks ago I visited Casa Gomis with my friend and fellow architect Pera Buil of Vora, the Barcelona-based studio. Also known as La Ricarda, the house sits in a pine forest near El Prat de Llobregat, south of the city. It was designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Bonet i Castellana for the Gomis-Bertrand family in the late 1940s and built through the 1960s.
I've been thinking about it ever since.
What strikes you first about Casa Gomis is how resolved it is. The plan is organised on a precise square grid, with a series of elongated bays or "fingers" extending into the landscape. The discipline of the grid creates a clarity that runs through every part of the building, from the structural system down to the position of a door handle.
The Catalan vaulted ceilings sit on slender steel columns, which means there are no load-bearing walls. The interior is entirely open, entirely adaptable. The vaults themselves are structurally efficient, using the minimum material to span the maximum distance, and they contribute directly to the building's ventilation strategy by drawing warm air upward and out.
The surrounding pine trees aren't incidental to the architecture. They're part of it. They provide shade, enclose the garden terraces, and create what amounts to a secondary roof over parts of the site. Bonet i Castellana was working with the landscape rather than placing a building on top of it.
What's remarkable about Casa Gomis, seen through a contemporary lens, is how comprehensively it addresses the principles we now group under "sustainable design," and it does so through architecture rather than technology.
The building is oriented on a grid aligned with the sun's path. Generous roof overhangs block the high summer sun while allowing the lower winter sun to penetrate deep into the interior. On the west elevation, timber louvres screen against the intense afternoon heat without blocking light or view. Circular coloured glass insets punctuate the facades, filtering daylight into the interior in ways that shift through the day. These aren't decorative gestures. They're doing real environmental work.
At RISE we talk about passive solar design as a first principle on every project, the idea that orientation, massing, and aperture should do as much of the climate control work as possible before any mechanical system is introduced. Casa Gomis was doing this seventy years ago with greater rigour and elegance than most buildings achieve today.
The rainwater outlets along the facade are a good example of what separates this building from ordinary architecture. Instead of conventional downpipes, Bonet i Castellana designed a series of rhythmic projecting spouts that turn drainage into a compositional element. A functional necessity becomes part of the architecture's language.
The material palette is deliberately limited. There's a consistency of material and colour throughout that reduces visual noise and has contributed to the building's extraordinary sense of timelessness. It also reduces waste, both in construction and in the long-term maintenance of the building.
These aren't grand gestures. They're the product of sustained attention to how a building actually works: how water runs off it, how light enters it, how air moves through it, how people inhabit it across the course of a day.
Casa Gomis was designed before the language of sustainable architecture existed, before embodied carbon was a metric, before Passivhaus was a standard. And yet it achieves thermal comfort through design intelligence rather than mechanical compensation. Its structural system minimises material use. Its orientation and shading strategy reduces energy demand. Its plan allows for flexibility and adaptation over time.
The building is a reminder that the most effective sustainable strategies tend to be the most fundamental ones: work with the sun, work with the landscape, use materials efficiently, design for longevity. These aren't new ideas. They're old ideas that the construction industry spent several decades forgetting.
Visiting Casa Gomis with Pera was one of those rare experiences where a building genuinely shifts how you're thinking. Not because it offers solutions you hadn't encountered before, but because it demonstrates how completely those solutions can be integrated into a building that is, first and foremost, a remarkable piece of architecture.
That's the benchmark we're interested in at RISE. Not sustainability as a checklist applied over a design, but sustainability as something embedded in the logic of the building from the first decision. The two don't need to be in tension. Casa Gomis is proof of that.
If you're thinking about a project and want to talk about how these principles might apply, we'd be glad to have that conversation.
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