Where BAU is now
BAU-B Arquitectura i Urbanisme is a design office for urban planning, urban design, and architecture. Over the last 30 years BAU has established itself as an international practice with a team of different professionals: urban planners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects and engineers.
BAU has been involved in the strategic urban planning and design of cities around the world, most of which involved public-private partnerships.
BAU can rely on an extended academic and field-research experience, as well as a long-standing practice in Urban and Architectural design, with experience in the implementation on a European level of complex urban projects on derelict infrastructural sites and in the development of various intermediate scale residential urban residential projects.
Thanks to multidisciplinary approach to complex design issues, BAU has an extensive practice in large-scale urban master planning and design, landscape interventions, waterfront projects and public space projects.
We are convinced that the sustainable cities of the future will have to be equipped with communal structures and spaces. For this reason, we base our plans on an in-depth analysis of all the aspects of a mission, so that the solutions fit into the physical context to respond to its problems and create these convivial spaces.
BAU’s professional, interdisciplinary, and multicultural team is based in Barcelona. We are used to working outside Spain with local teams from different countries. This mixed and different perspective can be developed by following shared “principles” which find quite specific declinations according to the vision of landscape designers or architects, for example, who are involved in the execution of a strong holistic “vision” capable of developing in time.
From where BAU comes
Joan Busquets founded BAU-B Arquitectura i Urbanisme in 1989, a private planning, urban design and architecture practice. Over the last 35 years, BAU has established itself as an international office covering multiple scales of work: urban research, masterplan, urban projects, public space and architecture,
From 1983 he was Head of Urban Planning for the Barcelona City Council, responsible the preparations for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, including the New Downtowns program for the City.
In 1969, he was a founding member of the ‘Laboratorio de Urbanismo of Barcelona’ (LUB-UPC).
From 1979 to 2002 Joan was Chair-Professor at ETSAB-Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona. Since 2002 he is ‘Martin Bucksbaum’ Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard-GSD.
The academic experience together with the urban planning experience in the public administration ensures that the studio's projects are both up-to-date and feasible designs.