3 posts tagged “barcelona”

Here are some images of the final review of the studio Sandra and I teached this semester at the Esarq in Barcelona. The studio is part of the Genetic Architecture Studio, a postgraduate course at the Universidad Internacional de Catalunya exploring novel architectural conditions emerging out of the collision of natural science and computational 

design techniques. This semesters task was to design a combination of Bar and Butterfly house on the premises of the parc Guell in Barcelona. The site marks one of the highest points of the park, unfolding in lavish views over Barcelona. The students explorations encompassed topological conditions as well as botanical phenomena such as veining and infloresce

On invitation by the ESARQ, Sandra and I joined into the SIMAE Conference in Barcelona. The intense, three day conference covered a wide range of issues involved in the field of contemporary architecture design. The speakers could be devided into three categories: Practitioners of the Architecture discipline, Theorists and figures involved in 

the information of the Architecture field. Whilst Ali Rahim, head of the New York based company CAP and Evan Douglis definitely belong into the first category, Neal Leach, Michael Winestock and Bernard Cache belong to the second. (Yes, I know, Bernard Cache is fabricating a lot around this days, but I still don´t consider him an entrepreneur.)

The last two weeks Sandra and myself have been conducting a workshop at the Genetic Architecture Master course of the ESARQ in Barcelona. The main Issue of the workshop was the exploration of the opportunities present in the manyfold conditions of floral entities. The explored issue included venetion, plication, inflorescence, topology and ornament.

After a short research stint the students had to apply their specific findings to the design of a Flowerstore. The store was supposed to be a free standing structure about 180m2 size. For the first, hands on, exploration, we made a short excursion to the Park Güell, in order to scrutinize flowers, and to examine Gaudis work in terms of relations to floral ornamentation. The harder work was to avoid simple mimicking the observed floral conditions, but to apply it in accordance to the discussed issues.  After 9 days of hard work the students presented their work to a Jury we put together including Marco Verde and Max Zinnecker from Barcelona based architecture firm Cloud 9. I have to say that both Sandra and myself were astounded by the enormous progress the students made in nine days.