Jordi Bernadó: architecture as a lived space

There’s a key that very few people possess. It opens the door to someone else’s home, in a city you are still learning to understand. Throughout his work, Jordi Bernadó (Lleida, 1966) has spent decades pursuing access to that key – not to enter the most spectacular places, but the most truthful ones.

“To know someone’s home is to know them,” says Bernadó, who believes a home is a portrait. That belief that runs through all his work: architecture isn’t the walls themselves, but the lives lived within them. The objects that gather over time. The light that falls at a certain hour. The history that settles into every corner. A home isn’t designed, it’s inhabited.

In 2026, as the world turns its gaze towards Barcelona, UNESCO World Capital of Architecture, La Roca Village turns its attention to the city’s creators. To those who shape Barcelona’s identity every day, often without realising it, through Bernadó’s lens. For ‘A Doorway to Barcelona’, the artist visited 24 homes – from La Pedrera to El Raval – guided by a single question: what does it mean to live in this city?

24 photographs, 24 stories. Each image captures one of the values that define Barcelona: diversity, openness, talent, creativity, community and future. These aren’t perfect examples of architecture; they’re singular, authentic, lived-in spaces. Among them is the home of the last resident of La Pedrera: the woman who still inhabits Gaudí’s building, not as a monument, but as a home.

“What unites us is not where we were born,” Bernadó reflects. “What unites us are values. Culture. Poetry.” His gaze makes no distinction between those born in Barcelona and those who arrived ten years ago and chose to stay. The city also belongs to its newcomers. Its exiles. Its chosen ones.

At its core, Bernadó’s work is that of a chronicler of intimacy. There’s an inevitable voyeurism in his images – the fascination with the private that becomes universal the moment someone chooses to reveal it. There are no poses. No staging. Only the chair where someone sits every morning. The half-finished book. The window overlooking a courtyard no one else knows.

His photographs unfold along La Roca Village’s boulevards, inviting visitors to wander through Bernadó’s Barcelona as one wanders through a neighbourhood: slowly, curiously, allowing themselves to be surprised by the doorway they hadn’t noticed before.

A selection of these works will also be presented in The Apartment in a private, invitation-only experience reserved for those who hold the key. Original prints and archival works, each displayed with all the rituals preservation demands: gloves, boxes, revered hush. An intimate experience for those who understand that some things simply can’t be reproduced.

The result isn’t a report on Barcelona. It’s a portrait. A city seen from within, through the intimacy of those who build it every day without ever realising they’re doing so.

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