The volume Josep Llinás. Copying What You See presents a research developed through the architectural project itself. The book documents Josep Llinás’s intervention in the 406 building of the Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, showing how the project emerges from a careful reading of the site, from the original work of Leopoldo Rother, and from a series of cultural and architectural references that act as catalysts in the design process.
Rather than presenting only the final result, the publication is structured as a detailed chronicle of the design process. Through successive reports, drawings, models and reflections, the book allows the reader to follow the evolution of the proposal from the first observations to the final definition of the intervention, revealing the mechanisms through which an architectural idea gradually takes shape.
At the centre of this research lies the method that gives the book its title: “copying what you see”. For Llinás, copying does not mean literally reproducing existing forms, but rather learning to observe, interpret and transform them. Architecture thus emerges from an attentive gaze capable of discovering, within what already exists—or even within images and memories—the starting point for new spatial configurations.
More than the documentation of a project, the book proposes a reflection on architecture as a process of knowledge. Its pages reveal how research and professional practice can become part of the same activity, showing that the architectural project itself is also a way of producing thought and generating research through practice.
Josep Llinás. He has won the FAD Prize three times, in 1977 in the interior design category, in 1996 for the restoration of the Metropol Theatre in Tarragona and in 2006 for the creation of the Jaume Fuster Library in Barcelona. Likewise, in 1995 he was awarded the City of Barcelona Prize for architecture for his residential building on Carmen Street in Barcelona, in 2000 he won the Prize of the 5th Spanish Architecture and Urban Planning Biennial for the Central Library of Terrasa and in 2006 he was presented with the National Architecture and Public Space Prize from the Catalan Government for the Jaume Fuster Library.
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