BD Barcelona was born in a nightclub. In 1972, a group of young architects — Oscar Tusquets among them — gathered at Bocaccio, the late-night haunt of Barcelona’s creative and intellectual set, and decided to produce the furniture no one else would: their own designs, and the work of artists and architects they admired. BD doesn’t manufacture so much as publish, editing a catalog that has included Ettore Sottsass, Álvaro Siza and Charles Rennie Mackintosh alongside the studio’s own designers. The making happens close to home: for more than fifty years, BD has worked with a network of manufacturers and artisans within 100 kilometers of its Barcelona headquarters, a commitment that keeps Catalan craft traditions alive and the production footprint small.

Its most singular contribution is bringing the furniture of Antoni Gaudí and Salvador Dalí into production. Gaudí’s pieces for Casa Calvet and Casa Batlló, and Dalí’s surrealist objects — lamps on crutches, a lamb with a drawer in its belly — are produced as BD Art Editions: limited, numbered works made in small quantities. At Rewire, these are marked Art Editions and available on request.

Today BD is owned by a collective — Apartamento Magazine, Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Luna Paiva, Hernán Cortés and Igor Urdampilleta — together with co-founder Oscar Tusquets, carrying forward the nonconformist spirit the studio has held for more than half a century.