Within a highly experimental framework, this studio seeks to radicalize the discourse around the role of architecture as a subversive strategy to redefine the role of segregated territories and ageing infrastructures at the urban scale. The objective is to work with concepts around means of connectedness at a territorial scale, emphasizing aspects of mobility, infrastructure, environmental strategies, energy and landscape, based on the thesis that architecture must be at the center of the problem.
Students will identify and explore diverse scales, from urban formations to the definition of singularities such as buildings, units, or components, that may create new conditions of urbanity for the 21st century. Therefore, students will work at the urban, building, and component scale, to finally develop physical prototypes of components.
+ What constitutes a radical region?
+ Which design strategies will redefine cities as hybrid terrains embracing the whole built environment, merging traditional boundaries existing between the disciplines of architecture, urbanism, landscape and infrastructure?
+ Can site specific environments be formulated through associative design strategies to increase the relevance of architecture at a urban scale?
+ Could dislocated territories be repositioned as hybrid terrains offering unexpected relationships and fields of experimentation?
RESEARCH AREA
Within the regional area of Barcelona, the Besos River represents one of the main rivers crossing the entire city and the regional area of Catalunya.
Once a productive ecosystem on the outskirts of Barcelona, the intense rate of urbanization in the Regional Area has occupied vast areas and the Besos River is under extreme pressure in terms of pollution, mobility, programatic fragmentation, and ecology. This condition is exacerbating nowadays, to the point of the river currently appears segregating the territory.
The Besos River underwent an “environmental recovery” in recent years and will be conglomerating 4 Municipalities, making this area an excellent testing ground for the study of new ideas, models and radical transformations.
