Catalan context.

This sleek new faculty building in Barcelona is an imaginative response to an awkward site in the city's labyrinthine medieval core.

Since the 1970s, the labyrinthine paseos and buildings of Barcelona's dense Barri Gotic have been progressively rehabilitated through a series of modest urban design initiatives. Co-ordinated by Oriol Bohigas, the strategy has concentrated on renewing the decaying city fabric by establishing small-scale piazzas, and restoring significant buildings, such as churches and convents. The strategy has also given rise to the much larger intervention of Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art (AR March 1997), which forms the north edge of the rather bleak new Placa dels Angels. Meier's formidable building is an assured and heroic piece of architecture, but its unremitting bulk tends to eclipse its surroundings. To the north of the MCA, is the fourteenth-century convent of the Casa de la Caritat, now converted into a Centre for Modern Art by Albert Viaplana and Helio Pinon. This overlooks a smaller square to the west, which originally formed part of the convent's lands, its south side partly defined by the pristine flanks of Meier's massive museum.

The eastern edge of this smaller square has been recently colonised by a new building housing the Communications Sciences Faculty of Barcelona University. Designed by the local practice of Varis Arquitectes, the new insertion responds to its exacting context with subtlety and invention, mediating between the historic convent and the imposingly contemporary MCA.

The five-storey block is set against the blank party wall of an adjoining apartment building. Most of the faculty accommodation - essentially seminar and lecture rooms of varying sizes - is contained in a rectangular slab running parallel to the square. This crisply articulated volume is wrapped in sleek aluminium cladding panels, intermittently perforated by horizontal slashes of glazing. Elongated windows are protected from the sun's glare by mechanical shutters, angled like heavy eyelids. The faculty's double-height cafeteria occupies the ground floor; here the walls are fully glazed, so that students can spill out into the square on warm days, adding animation and life to the urban scene.

On the shorter south elevation, the upper three floors are cantilevered out, sculpturally terminating the block. The projecting end is randomly studded with tiny square openings, like a computer punch card. The upper three floors are also pulled clear of the party wall on the east side, forming an

interstitial slot. This is glazed over, bringing light into the generous double-height volume of the library which wraps around the care. The upper floors house cellular lecture and seminar rooms, enclosed by a gently curving wall containing banks of individual lockers.

To the north, the rectangular block tapers to a wedge between existing buildings, finally extruding out on to the narrow calle Valldonzella as a sheer, translucent plane. The glacial skin forms a starkly contemporary foil to the eroded stone and ornate mouldings of the Barri Gotic. This compressed portion of the faculty contains administrative offices and the deanery, separated from teaching spaces by the main entrance hall and a glazed node of circulation.

Although modest in scale and execution, the building responds to its context with an austere formalism that resists the blandishments of historical pastiche. Instead, through sensitive placemaking and a refined material presence it makes a contribution both to Barcelona's incremental architectural evolution and the wider social life of the city.

Architect Varis Arqiutectes, Barcelona

Project Team Dani Freixes, Vincente Miranda, Vicenc Bou, Eulalia Gonzalez, Ricard Pie, Anton Alsina, Artur Arias

Structural engineer Robert Brufau

Photographs Mihail Moldoveanu