Is it possible to write a book about architecture in Barcelona without mentioning Gaudí? Nope, but a new source book from Actar comes close. Patent Constructions: New Architecture made in Catalonia is packed with enough cool projects from the past five years that you'll be saying "¿Antoni quién?" as you prowl its pages looking for the next big thing.

The 30 buildings, parks, and structural fragments, here write a new chapter in Catalan architectural history. At the turn of the last century, Gaudí put the city in the global design spotlight. One hundred years later, it's happening again.

This new wave has been growing for the past three decades. In Spain, the years between the end of Franco's dictatorship in 1975 and the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 exploded with a building boom unlike anything the country had ever seen. Spain's transformation into a world-class democracy was written in--and by--its architecture. Barcelona especially used new buildings to open up its parks and plazas into vibrant public spaces, pulling the city out of fascism. Richard Meier's glassy Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona brightened up the Raval neighborhood while SOM and Frank Gehry worked their magic on the waterfront, turning a grungy port into a flashy welcome mat for the rest of the world.

Now it's the locals' turn.

Editor Albert Ferré focuses on buildings that think big with limited means. The architects and small studios he includes rarely had access to bloated R&D budgets or deep-pocketed clients. What they did have was unfettered creativity, and their projects, drawing on Catalan architecture's recent history of social responsibility, show a special power for adapting to--and changing--the unique settings they're built in.

Take Villa Bio, a tiny house in the hills outside of Barcelona designed by Enric Ruiz-Geli's Cloud 9 studio. The structure is literally a product of its environment--Ruiz-Geli sliced off a ribbon of hillside, twisted it in on itself, capped the ends with glass, and plunked it down over a dugout garage. A Möbius strip of a house, its one, continuous plane turns from parking spot to kitchen to bedroom to porch to roof-top garden as you walk though it: a brilliant way to fit a lot of house on the miniscule footprint dictated by the site plan.

Pich-Aguilera Architects worked on an even smaller scale, turning a humble curtain wall into a manifesto of locally focused, creatively sustainable design. Working with an existing office building, a limited budget, and a demanding environment, Pich-Aguilera used polycarbonate instead of glass (it's cheaper and lighter), then silk-screened it with different colors to shade interiors from the harsh Spanish sun and spruce them up at the same time (who wouldn't want to see their office through rose-, or blue-, or yellow-colored glass?). On the occasional chilly day, an air pocket sandwiched between the panes keeps the building heated. Instead of manufacturing custom insulation for the plastic windows, the project's technical director, Josep Solé, used material designed to insulate air-conditioning ducts--again, much cheaper. As Solé explained, "When we talk about innovation we generally think of heavy investment with a complex, highly sophisticated organization, but innovation also lies in using existing materials in a different way."