Ana Vargas Núñez (València) belongs to a generation of architects who learned the craft in other people’s studios and on the building site before founding a studio of her own. She trained at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de València, part of the Universitat Politècnica, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture between 2010 and 2016 and her professional Master’s degree in 2016. Since then she has worked in several Valencian studios with telling consistency: Arqueha Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Jose Costa Arq., el fabricante de espheras —where she worked on heritage, housing and public works projects— and mcbad, on urban planning, public facilities and collective housing. In each of them the same task recurs, the one that runs from drawing the proposal to directing the works on site, and in that continuity between thinking and building much of her way of working can already be recognised.

The studio was born in 2019 from la Cooperativeta, a competition entry for cooperative housing in Gandia with which she was a finalist in the competition held by the Official College of Architects of the Valencian Community. The project reflected on other ways of living and on how architecture can foster community life, seeking a balance between the privacy of each home and shared spaces designed for gathering. To this end it proposed homes able to change over the years: a fixed core that houses the services and, around it, pieces that are added or removed as each family’s needs change, along with threshold spaces that can be incorporated into the interior of the house. That project gave the studio its name and, above all, set out an understanding of architecture that is now part of its identity.

From València, la Cooperativeta works across a range of scales, from homes and furniture to small public buildings. Its projects pursue timeless solutions that bring flexibility to everyday life and bring out the value of inherited architecture, with an attention to detail rooted in the conviction that humanising space means, above all, caring for it up close. Ana Vargas leads the studio today and takes the same pleasure in two gestures that rarely coexist so naturally: illustrating her projects by hand and directing their construction on site.