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Category Archives: RS1. Emergent Territories
pensar el futuro – thinking the future
CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona) has organized a very interesting cycle of conferencies about future. Although is not directly related to our Studio projects, it may help for braimstorming, and no doubt it will make us think.
Monday 25 January at 7.30 p.m.
The Future of Work: Sidi Mohammed Barkat, philosopher, expert in ergonomics, lecturer at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Monday 1 February at 7.30 p.m.
The Future of Islam: Faisal Devji, historian, lecturer at the University of Oxford and author of Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, Cornell University Press, 2005 (published in Spanish as Paisajes del yijah. Militancia, moralidad, modernidad, Edicions Bellaterra, 2007).
Monday 8 February at 7.30 p.m.
The Future of Biomedicine: Jordi Camí, Professor of Pharmacology at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona and General Director of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park and of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.
Monday 15 February at 7.30 p.m.
The Future of the Family: Anna Cabré, Director of the Centre of Demographic Studies and Professor of Human Geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Monday 22 February at 7.30 p.m.
The Future of Democracy and of the Imagination: Azar Nafisi, writer and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, author of Reading Lolita in Teheran, Random House 2003 (published in Spanish as Leer Lolita en Teherán, El Aleph, 2003) and Things I’ve Been Silent About, Random House, 2008 (published in Spanish as Cosas que he callado, Duomo, 2010).
Monday 1 March 7.30 p.m.
The Fragile Future of Utopias: Francisco Jarauta, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Murcia.
Monday 8 March 7.30 p.m.
The Future of the Soul: Eva Illouz, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, University of California Press, 1997 (published in Spanish as El consumo de la utopía romàntica, Katz, 2007).
Monday 15 March 7.30 p.m.
Closing lecture: Antonio Tabucchi, writer.
RS1 – WEEK4
In order to optimize solar energy, we used Ecotect and Grasshopper to find the perfect angle for solar panelling, which will be applied in the roofs of the buildings. We found the way so that no roof will be in shadow during the most efficient hours of the day, and, in addition, this built solar-panelling will give our city the formal identity we are searching for.
Starting from a railway line that goes perpendicular to the sea, the main paths of our project go perpendicular to this transportation system. There are three attraction points for diferent working sectors, and the density of the city will be proportional to the distance to these points. Moreover, each parcel is divided in four parts, so that we could use, depending on the density, the four of them, three, two, just one or none of them.
This process leads us to have a big amount of tipology possibilities, as shown below.
pd.: Desk crit 2010/01/15
- Good direction, but flat proposal in terms of complexity and diversity: lack of perpendicular transportation, lack of sub-hierarchy of public spaces (path widths…).
- Too basic use of solar panels: possible change of orientation depending on the function (time of use). Assumption that some buildings should not have solar panels, due to functional and representative factors.
- Water: transition from build (solar panels + housing/working) to void (water maintaining + public spaces/representative functions).
RS1 – WEEK3
We gave up the research showed in RS1-WEEK2 post, and focused on the characteristics of the terrain chosen for the project: arid climate, lack of river, seaside, mountainous terrain. How could we create an habitat in such a difficult environment?
We realized that we had enough water and energy, so that we could use energy to make water usable and start a cycle. The size of these infraestructures (desalinization, purification plants) and the habitat created from it (city, arable area) would be the identity we need for our city. We prefer showing than hiding this facts, and believe that the visibility of all of them would work as an awareness of the importance of saving as much as water/energy possible.
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RS1 – WEEK2
We followed developping the scale factor of identity, and played with the mobility concept (trasport of human, goods, materia…), one of the biggest probems nowadays. We worked in a very conceptual (maybe too conceptual) way, dividing the world in time-slots and searching for a hierarchy that would result in a more efficient way of mobility in the world.
We also tried to define self-sufficiency, and based our research in the ecological footprint concept. Due to that concept, we tried to determinate a no-trespassing line which would be the average of all the aspects mentioned in RS1-WEEK1 post. We considered impossible to be self-sufficient in each one of them, so we tried to play, thanks to grashopper, with a graph that would include all those aspect and their self-sufficiency average.
RS1 – Week1
How could we design a self-sufficient city from scratch? How abstract an environment could be?
We started analysing the list of world’s cities by quality of living according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting, in order to analyze which are the optimum envinonmental conditions for a city. Our aim was to create a city where those conditions would be reversed, that is, creating a good project in a difficult environment. That environment would have these characteristics: arid climate, lack of river, seaside, mountainous terrain.
The use of Grasshopper led us to randomize these variants and to create different base-terrains depending on the randomization degree.
In addition, we also considered essential to identify a key-word which could resume our aims. That key-word is identity, a word that groups not only culture, language or religion, but also almost all aspects that concern our lifes, from food to energy, from waste to leisure, work, water, education. That identity concept is also related to scale, so we tried to specity the allowed scale for each of the aspects that concerns identity.