Since joining forces in 2004, Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga have forged an architecture of undeniable presence that nevertheless defers to its surroundings. A series of competitionwinning projects for cultural venues—from Philharmonic Hall for the Polish city of Szczecin, just completed, to the Museum of Fine Arts of Lausanne, Switzerland, in progress—have catapulted the Italian-Spanish partnership into a busy pan-European practice. Now based in Barcelona, the two first met in the studio of architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra in Seville, Spain, where Barozzi had arrived from the Università IUAV di Venezia on an Erasmus Scholarship, and Veiga had moved after working for Francisco Mangado in Pamplona, Spain.

Their early designs are particularly assertive in form, such as the Philharmonic Hall, whose facades of repeated glass-clad gables offer a ghostly, expressionist echo of the steep roof lines of the city. But in subsequent projects, they have given priority to resolving public spaces in response to a building’s context. In Lausanne, for example, they “spent a lot of time trying to make a stupendous building,” says Veiga. “But finally we understood that the best way to open a conversation with the site was to make a stupendous void.” He describes the result as “a plaza with three buildings around it that try to pass unnoticed.”