Course: Description of the Course
Aims and Contents
Thinking the city: The “model” city – an “open” prison
Foreword
Barcelona since the Olympics in 1992 has gone through an important renewal of its cityscape, becoming a reference for the urban development of consolidated towns. The different proposals and the way they have been carried out, as well as the areas that still have to be arranged, mostly at the city borders and at the former industrial sites, provide a large range of opportunities to think upon urban space and civic life in
the 21st century.
Barcelona has also changed its character; it has developed from provincial town to international city.
People of all parts of the world share space and services, sorrows and joys.
The fact that the responsible of this master course (Prof. Karin Hofert) comes from Barcelona invites to use the town as case study and living laboratory. BCN offers us the opportunity to research on specific issues developing a plausible proposal from city until detail scale.
Aim: an approach to the complexity of the city
The workshop will introduce to the complexity of the city structure.
Working in successive approaches, from city scale to architectural scale, forth and back, will allow understanding the urban form and its determining aspects: the morphology of the territory, the incidence of climate, the pressure of infrastructure, the traces of history, etc.; and of course the socio-economic aspects, related to human activity and its translation to space.
Barcelona is rich and complex, structured by all kind of patterns different in geometry, size, shape and contents. The working area is chosen strategically to give the opportunity to reflect on these contrasted realities; we will check in what amount they influence/determine our intervention on the site.
The pedagogical aim is to get the skills and knowledge to be able to propose a piece of town; of course a simplified piece of town, but capable to support the discussion about its borders and about its relationship with the neighbour pieces, and capable to allow the reflection on diverse building typologies and their (physical) relations.
To achieve this aim special emphasis will be given to the understanding of space in its three dimensions.Sections, perspective drawing and models shall be used from the very beginning, understood as tools more then as result representations. The learning process, participative and experimental, will be taken very much in consideration. At the same time skills concerning the best way to explain aims and results will be trained.
Topic: proposal for a sustainable micro-town
Within our society there is a human collective on which architects and planners seldom have the chance to reflect. A main issue in the activity of social workers, healthcare professionals, lawyers, and security workers is the one related to re-education of people who heavily failed in their co-living with the rest of society. But we hardly ever discuss about the space in which this re-education aiming re-insertion intosociety should take place. The term “prison” is evocative and wakes up a lot of connotations, but referring its physical layout it is undefined or at least ambiguous.Reinsertion in society takes place out of society. We all accept this contradiction based upon security reasons: we argue that somebody who has trespassed the basic coexistence rules will do that again unless (s)he is taught not to do it. So we detach the trespasser from society both for punishing her/him and for protecting society, by creating a temporary and physical space to teach how to behave in community.
The last aspect, which should be the determining one, very often hasn’t been or isn’t taken into consideration. That leads us to imagine a prison as something close to what many movies tell us: a cut-off storage of “inhumans” living in inhuman conditions. We have this common but limited vision of the jail typology also because by obvious reasons most of us never had the chance to enter a prison. Like a fortress, it only shows its blind exterior walls, the rest is hidden.
The studio is not going to discuss the pertinence of the enclosure. Assuming the sharp boundary, on one hand we will reflect on how to relate it to the closer surrounding, and on the other on how it offers the site for a “model” town: both an exemplary town and a in-scale town. Commonly when we insert or extend a piece of town we use it to connect and saw the existing tissues. Here it is just the opposite: by definition
the “new town” is an island surrounded by a physical barrier. One big challenge is how to deal with that.
As for the interior program, we will understand the prison as a piece of town that reproduces its main features: residential tissue merged with working spaces and “public” services. We will discuss if mixed-use -hybridisation is the key to make towns alive- makes sense here.
As a transversal requirement the concept of sustainability will inform any decision taken. Non-sustainable architecture/urbanism is useless; infrastructure and buildings should achieve solvency and comfort by passive means as much as possible.
By working both multiscale and multiuse we pursue the integration of diverse components of our discipline: landscape, sociology, technology, economy, art.
Interdisciplinary contributions
The complexity of this kind of decisions calls for an evaluation framework able to integrate information on effects and impacts of the design alternatives under investigation, with values and preferences of stakeholders and by eliciting the needs of the context. Multicriteria analysis (MCA) offers such a framework and is increasingly used in combination with several evaluation techniques. Given these premises, the goal of the course Multicriteria Analysis and Project Appraisal is to provide students with theoretical principles and methodologies for projects’ sustainability (economic, social and environmental)
evaluation.
Structure: A learning-by-doing itinerary
With the students working in groups, the course will be shaped as follows:
- Learning-oriented basic thematic lectures.
- Studio shaped applicative experimental workshops supported by case studies.
- Mid-term evaluations, referring to the project’s different stages of evolution. Final evaluation, reporting
the whole process.
- Related activities such as seminars and excursions.
- Study-tour to Barcelona (Spain) with onsite visits and lectures.
These joint activities count with the presence of external professionals of national and international
reputation.
The Site
Barcelona is a rectangular plane sloping gently down to the Mediterranean Sea at its southeast border. On the opposite northwest border the Collserola hill range protects it from the north winds. On both sides two rivers flank the area.
On the sea border a hill falling steeply down into the water completes an advantageous topography, especially in military terms. The Roman conquerors choose this place to found a “supply station” on their way to inner Iberia. A busy little town developed, attached to the sea andwith a fertile agricultural hinterland.
By time it became commercial, as its central position within the West Mediterranean Sea converted it in a trade centre for agricultural and craft products. In the middle age it was prosperous, but the “discovery” of America shifted trade to the Atlantic. For strategic reasons
Barcelona was not allowed to extend beyond its tight city walls. Only the little villages along the northwest border of the farmland grew slowly.
1850 an already pretty industrialized Barcelona trapped in its walls and nearly bursting, finally got permission to tear the walls down and urbanize the land between the city and the surrounding villages. This is the origin of the iconic grid. Cerdà’s “ Plano del Ensanche de Barcelona” was going to cover a surface nine times the existing one, which can be seen as a proper town foundation.
The last important town extension happened in the 60ies-70ies of last century, as an emergency response to the intense flow of immigrants from inner/agricultural Spain to industrial Catalunya.
Whole neighbourhoods emerged close to the mentioned borders: the two rivers and the northwest hill range.
The western part of this upper border previously had been occupied by the main religious congregations to establish their school complexes there. Hospitals, sport complexes, a military barracks and town facilities, mingled with quality residential, fill the last stripe between the dense town tissue and the sudden slope.
The 92’ Olympic Games left us a ring highway following this edge between the gentle sloping Barcelona plane and the steep slope of the hills. At some places the Ronda (ring) highway had to cut protruding ridges, creating containing walls and terraced slope bottoms.
The site we are going to work on has these features: close to the Ronda highway, but detached by a topographic jump, with several platforms until it slopes steeply to an emerging water basin on top of the first hill, offering amazing views on the town. Due to allocating a water storage plant and to its difficult access it did not yield to the urbanisation pressure. Natural and artificial topography make the place suitable for a program where physical borders are essential, but at the same time visually should disappear as much as possible. The proximity to the Ronda city highway and the highway to central Spain, the nearby hospital, high schools and universities, should bring the inmates closer to their families and help to their progressive integration in society.
Topography is determining for the project. How can we obtain horizontal spaces on a slope? Shall we remove or provide soil? Or shall we take advantage of the existing platforms? Can a solid built security border be permeable to the view? What means has an architect to visually erase a limit? How can the “public” space of a prison contribute to “proper” social interaction? What role does sustainability, resilience, and economy play? This is only a little sample of a large amount of questions that will arise.