José Costa is an architect and founder of José Costa ARQ., an architecture studio based in Valencia that understands architectural practice as an active tool for improving the ways we inhabit space. The studio operates as an open platform, bringing together professionals from different disciplines who share a common ambition: to work with rigour, sensitivity and commitment through architecture.

The practice focuses on residential, cultural and workplace projects, always approached from a critical and analytical perspective. Each commission is conceived as an opportunity to explore the limits of programme and context, combining technical efficiency with creativity, material research and constant attention to the people who will occupy the spaces. Reuse, integration with the surrounding environment and close observation of real patterns of use are essential components of the studio’s working methodology.

José Costa was born in Alzira in 1978 and trained as an architect at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where he graduated in 2004. That same year, winning first prize in the IVVSA National Preliminary Design Competition —for the construction of a 42-unit housing project for young people in Benidorm— marked the beginning of an initial professional phase defined by projects developed within the Spanish context and an early public recognition of his work.

In 2011, Costa moved his practice to Rio de Janeiro, which became the studio’s main base until the end of 2014. During this period, he founded The House, a creative space conceived as a multidisciplinary extension of the studio, from which cross-disciplinary relationships between architecture, art, design and education were explored. This international experience broadened his frame of reference and consolidated an approach to architectural practice that remains open to experimentation and dialogue with other disciplines.

After four years in Brazil, José Costa returned to Valencia, where he continues to develop architectural projects, social initiatives and artistic proposals, both through his own studio and as a co-founder of the artistic collective Enredant. Today, José Costa ARQ. maintains a practice that combines reflection and action, with an architecture attentive to context, resources and, above all, to the people who inhabit it.