The School of Architecture of Barcelona (ETSAB) is the largest and oldest school of architecture in Catalonia. It offers training in all the cycles of university education, both undergraduate and master's degrees, and has a leading role in research in the Spanish and Ibero-American university environment thanks to the work of its teaching staff, which meets through groups of Research from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia BarcelonaTech (UPC). The school is also leading the landscaping education in Spain, and it stays in constant collaboration with the most prestigious schools in Europe.

As a public school, its vocation is at the service of society as a whole, with a strong commitment to an architecture and a lively and cultured contemporary city, and with a special sensitivity for public, democratic and quality space. The studies taught have a strong technical, cultural and urban component, which allows our graduates to be positioned in the most diverse positions of the process of definition and construction of the environment. Becoming liberal professionals, civil servants or contracted by industry, able to understand reality through the architectural project.

The School of Architecture of Barcelona was founded on 18 September 1875 in the heart of the University of Barcelona. Their background goes back to the School of Noble Arts of the Lonja, called the Llotja School, founded in 1775 and sponsored by the Private Business Board of Barcelona, ​​from which the Class of Architecture will be created, directed by Antoni Wineries from 1817. In 1850, he graduated from the old School of Noble Arts, transformed into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Jorge, the teaching of the craftsmanship of Works. The School of Masters of Works is the immediate precedent of the School of Architecture. In 1972, the ETSAB was co-founder of the UPC.

The ETSAB currently has 3,500 students (2,000 undergraduate, 700th final project, and 800 in master's and doctoral degree), as well as incorporating 130 students from exchange programs from more than eighty of the most prestigious schools of architecture of the world. The annual average of degrees that are given to the ETSAB is 375 and the total number of teaching staff is 300.

The ETSAB has enjoyed the prestige of figures such as its first director, Elíes Rogent, or those of modernist architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. The most significant figures of the Modern Movement and the Catalan school of architecture have also participated in the construction of their teaching tradition and have had a significant influence on the construction of the city: from Josep Lluís Sert and José Antonio Coderch until Contemporary architects such as Rafael Moneo, Oriol Bohigas, Albert Viaplana, Enric Miralles, Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Manuel de Solà-Morales, among others.

The ETSAB continues to exert a continuous influence on the development and design of Barcelona and maintains a permanent dialogue in the debates generated by the city through its critical capacity and its intellectual influence. This capacity to generate and sustain debates typical of architecture and urban development has a significant influence on national and international territory. In this way, it is possible to build a global reference in the field of planning and urban design and construction, in the debates of environmental culture, in technological development, while in the exercise of criticism, and in the investigation of the history and the communication of the culture.

The ETSAB complements its cultural dimension by offering permanent activities in the field of exhibitions, conferences, seminars, roundtables, publications, screenings or concerts. It also has important archives such as the one that concentrates the Gaudí Chair, and with a historical and current bibliographic collection that highlights it among other public and private centers. The ETSAB stands out for the intellectual and social commitment that it imparts in its teaching, thanks to the exigency, the dedication and the intensity of the work that develops the students. The dimension of the center, as well as these characteristics of its teaching, are aimed at achieving a level of excellence in all its educational offers. As a result of this potential, a solid structure of exchange between the students and teachers of the ETSAB has been consolidated in recent years with those of other international universities.