To resolve such problems, people don’t usually resort to architects. Probably nobody thinks of them as professionals willing to help, or to interpret the case history of a person or a residential community that requires on-the-spot analysis.

Arquitectes de Capçalera (General Practitioners in Architecture) offers the Raval neighbourhood’s neediest residents the possibility of collaboration with future architects in imagining, planning and studying the viability of such changes to their houses and residential buildings, improving both their habitat and relations between them.

The idea is to accompany them in charting their needs and diagnosing possible solutions, guiding them towards the start-up of the necessary rectifications, both in terms of planning and legal management, as well as the obtaining of financial subsidies for implementing them. The idea is to establish close contact, in line with the main goal of reconnecting architecture with society. This is an opportunity to place emphasis on cooperation models where learning intervenes directly in actions directed towards and by citizens.

Arquitectes de Capçalera at Piso Piloto exhibition

In the CCCB’s patio, during the period that the exhibition “Piso Piloto” (Show Home) was running, a Free Residents’ Advice Office opened allowing a limited series of cases to be tackled. A team of students and lecturers from the Housing and City course at Barcelona’s Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAB) was assigned to attend queries from the residents.

At university we are trained in an ABC that supposedly equips us with the instruments necessary to exercise as architects. Diverse and simultaneous study plans show the enormous difficulty in setting basic criteria aiming to make what the profession needs compatible with what is ordered by the European, national or autonomous community regulations, often governed by generalist bases that do not recognise the uniqueness of these studies that swing between the technical, the artistic and the social. Individual teaching units, even individual lecturers, have the responsibility and authority to accentuate the few levers remaining to them in order to gear studies towards wherever they believe is appropriate at a time when the dual crisis – economic and professional – is pushing us to reformulate the fundamentals of architectural training.

Some teaching staff believe that the important thing is to learn techniques consisting of tools and construction elements and supposed laws of composition that allow the planning, and ultimately, the construction of buildings. Others lay stress on cultural and artistic aspects, understanding that an architect acts as a creative director who has essential technical knowledge that allows him to run and coordinate the project’s conceptual and stylistic materialisation. Still others, in contrast, include architecture in a more diffuse field where the architect (whether he builds or not) mediates in a more complex society where technical experience is at the service of a collective aspiration influenced by other agents who demand complicity from the social sciences with the aim of exhausting reality through the design project.

All these simultaneous and complementary visions accentuate the nature of each study plan according to its traditions, and, of course, the labour context in which each operates. Because, let’s not forget, they should all share a common aim: offering studies that guarantee that their students achieve entry into the labour market.

Today, in Barcelona and the rest of the country, this target is far from being reached. One only has to review the statistics to realise the enormous and dramatic difficulties architects face in finding work, not to mention in embarking on their own entrepreneurial adventures.

Some will say that the problem is circumstantial, which means universities do not need to adapt to such ups and downs. “Everything will revert to normal”, they say, suggesting that the architect’s profile need not be substantially modified because sooner or later architects will recover their original status and society will continue needing talented (higher?) technical architects who will retake the sceptre and crown of the built environment. Others demand in-depth revision of the contents and assignments of a profession that has changed forever; whether assuming the remains of a certain technical responsibility, sharing it with other professional collectives that by simplifying and specialising their knowledge have demonstrated the same efficiency, or by demanding of themselves greater commitment to a disaffected society that is demanding bottom-up transformation, where the architect has not yet become fully incorporated as an agent in city policy, or in community management, negotiation or communication processes.

The level of disorientation is considerable and every teaching unit tackles it by emphasising its own criteria. In the case of the ETSAB – undeniably the star of the glory years of a Barcelona influential in architecture and urban design matters – the changes seem to be coming in fits and starts. Left orphaned of reference figures (due to deaths, retirements and departures), today nobody exists who can push and give a unitary sense to an in-depth transformation. In fact, we do not even believe that such a unitary vision is desirable in a profession that has diversified and is increasingly distant from society, and in a school that is in decline (in terms of students, resources and influence) and is resisting the renewal of its structures.

Something similar is happening in the whole of society, where the degeneration of democracy and of political parties is causing a systemic disorder. We are living through a crucial time where citizens who do not feel properly represented are demanding greater participation, transparency and a decided course towards a new model. At the university, which has many qualities of a laboratory but has never completely lost its link to the social reality, in-depth changes are also augured. The first symptoms have been experienced in recent years with emotive assemblies where many students have demanded greater participation in the definition of the studies model, with greater contingency in a pressing reality and with perspectives complementary to that of the invariable builder architect. Hopeful students who continue believing that the university is the best bridge for strengthening the contract that the profession has with a society that, these days, sees us as distracted with a supposed beautification of our environment, under the orders of the political powers or the pressure of runaway capitalism.

And although students are demanding changes, it is surprising that – for example – academic plans on housing are still so close to the “commission” and so distant from the emergencies that are shaking our city and by extension the world. One only has to ask associations such as Cáritas, Arrels, the PAH, Médicos Sin Fronteras, or even the military, how many architects are cooperating with them. But even more important is asking them what added or intrinsic value they believe architects can bring to the vast task of helping improve the habitats of collectives that suffer or are at risk of suffering exclusion and that, today, can not count on us.

They barely need us and this is hard to accept, despite the fact that the raw materials with which they work (subjects and objects) are also concerns of ours. At the university we remain ill-prepared to show capabilities in these issues or rather, we remain unwilling to accept that these matters also form part of our capabilities.

Coderch, in his oft-cited article for Domus in 1961, “It’s not geniuses that we need now”, reminded us of this contract with reality: “Open you eyes wide, look, it is much simpler than you imagine.”

I doubt that it is simpler, but undoubtedly it is more urgent, useful, surprising, impassioned and educational than many of us teachers imagine. Reality outdoes fiction and, in my opinion, the school is living in a determined fiction and being dowsed with a reality imposed by an inherited script that few will be able to put into practice in the future. The architect that does not yet exist (at least in the academic plans) is a different architect who should be able to work without a closed script that prejudges problems and solutions, instead being someone who investigates by opening their eyes wide, converting each project into a kind of documentary where, step by step, the usefulness (and the beauty!) of the project design is described.

The best examples are outside the university, in the hands of multidisciplinary collectives that day by day invent small-scale pilot proposals – real and utopian – that reveal truisms that academia does not see, does not look at, or that are at most relegated to “optional” status. These show us the enormous potential for cooperation in the gestation and co-management of projects with people. Knowing how to ask, demand, communicate and, in short, share knowledge, making private laboratory research work compatible with a clear vocation to open up the process by going down into the ring to contaminate it with harsh reality.

We do not know what will happen with the ETSAB and the ETSAV. Every day new and intriguing voices emerge that augur a progressive disappearance of one or the other, the sale of their premises to reduce the UPC’s enormous debt, cuts in the already miserly financial remuneration of their associated teaching staff, the impossibility of incorporating new staff or the refusal of resources for research projects already under way… Today, inviting somebody to give lecture is fundamentally a commitment based on personal favours that it is difficult to maintain, while publishing anything becomes an exhausting nightmare. The new management at the ETSAB is trying to tackle these evident shortfalls with fresh and promising ideas that we hope will maintain their freshness and a commitment to not justifying changes only through cuts. But I do not believe today that solutions will emerge from subtle adjustments and even less so from internal debates between professional classes who wave the flag of authorship and supposed responsibility for the “commission”.

Political expert Joan Subirats in his article “Repolitizar la Arquitectura” (Repoliticising Architecture), published in El País in relation to the project “Barraca Barcelona” (Barcelona Hut) of 2003, reminded us that from the 1990s onward, architecture abandoned its social and political commitment, becoming solely concerned with stylistic issues. We have abundant evidence of this when we see how the starchitects move around the world taking advantage of the major opportunities offered by a globalised economy and a technology that allows them unprecedented audacity. Architects, like any other technical experts, should start experiencing problems with their conscience if they totally sever technical solutions from social problems or from explicit or implicit objectives in relation to what is requested. We need to introduce politics into what we do and it is imperative that universities accept the challenge of re-politicising architecture and of asking themselves what is the use of what is done, who wins and who loses out because of it, and at the service of what reality we are placing our work.

—Josep Bohigas, architect. Curator of “Barraca Barcelona”, “APTM” and “Piso Piloto” and promoter of Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

In Febrero, 2016, the project Arquitectes de Capçalera has been awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2015. From Quaderns, we want to congratulate all the team and people involved in the project.

More info at Arquitectes de Capçalera

[and ABOUT THE PLEASURE OF THE APPROPRIATION OF A TEXT].

The reproduction [the rewriting] of texts.

Such reproduction/rewriting of texts implies a constantly active attitude.

From the choice of the text [act of love] to the preservation and rehabilitation as re-design [new conception].

One avoids the [mystic-mysterious] tension of invention-creation and adopts the [entirely secular] quiet readiness to accept the inertia of [Darwinian] evolution.

One avoids the [anxiety-inducing-paralyzing] tension of invention-creation and adopts the [author’s] quiet readiness to self-adapt.

…

Fidelity-infidelity. Faithful in the transcription. Unfaithful in the transcription.

Literal-parallel. Literal-diverging. Aware-unaware.

The rewriting of texts avoids the [mystical-mysterious] tension of the invention-creation and adopts serene availability [all secular] to the inertia of evolution [darwinistic].

The rewriting of texts avoids the tension [that puts anxiety-that paralyzes] of the invention-creation and adopts the serene availability [of the author] to adaptation to himself.

…

The calm act

[because it requires no effort – even only to prepare the creative act]

of transcribing a text

chosen from the texts I love

and therefore even more beloved

often

sometimes

[from time to time]

almost as an adaptation to myself

fills some folds

with the unexpected and light

[and therefore wonderful] act

of invention.

Invention as an act of filling the voids.

INVENTION OF COMPENSATION.

[OBVIUS, 2014]

/// All drawings and texts by Beniamino Servino. More about his work, here.
/// We want to thank Beniamino who kindly shared this project with us.

There are a number of speculative projects that rely on housing research contexts sometimes difficult to imagine. In the same way that Aristide Antonas designed a house for the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, inspired on book Violence, in this case we have a project designed to provide housing to Judas Iscariot, in an exercise of architecture that seeks to re-think the role of Judas in the history of Christianity.

Its author, Cristian Valenzuela describes it as a sequence of movements and atmospheres to be traversed, proposes the transformation of Judas betrayal into his sacrifice, transformation to be enacted and personified by whoever submits to the rules of this space.
The house is proposed as an enclosed rectangular block to be found in the desert or the mountain.

We know the popular and historical animosity toward Judas, and it seems interesting to find a project that instead of punishing certain human attitudes, attempts to transform them through architecture. Details such as the reduced height of the chamber, aimed to create the feeling of burden, are part of this purpose, while transmit the feeling that the body will translate bowing the head down. There is another chamber devoid of any light, with the space to be revealed as a forest of pillars, some of them made of fresh cedar, the rest of charred wood. According to Valenzuela, the withdrawal of the sense of vision will put the body on different relationship with the surrounding space. Time and movement throughout the chamber will depend on complementary senses… It will not be possible to leave unstained.

With a graphic very similar to the one instituded recently by San Rocco magazine, with simple but powerful lines, creating the kind of axonometric that Massimo Scolari relates to a type of representations which are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures.

The complete project here:

“The research explores night urban landscape as a sensitive and cognitive relationship between people and their environment. The project focuses on the aesthetical process of identification of citizenship with their territory to emphasize the role of night in the definition of urban landscape –as the framework for leisure and socialization.

We believe that the opportunity to reformulate the basis of nightscape design involves the construction of a valid representation of itself. atNight aims to build interpretative cartographies of nightscape main assets in order to create a new critical model to share, discuss and develop ideas about nightscapes transformation.”

The access to data visualization allows a comprehensible way is useful to understand some issues that affects our cities as efficiency, transportation, and flows, among others.

atnight 1280×720 from atnightmaps on Vimeo.

The project is focused on the visual analysis of Barcelona, based on testing the potential of representation techniques of the city image by working on a night cartography. In this case, the aerial view reflects a world which is revealed in this extensive visual panorama of the city that has been drawn from the previous data assigning a sphere of influence to each point, is an organic interdependency between physical and visual structure of the city.

The interactions and active use of social networks like twitter, flickr and instagram, allows the team to collect more data in an open way. On the web-site of atNight you can explore the collected data and also follow the project on twitter for more info: @atnightmaps

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor.

More info: atNight and we also recommend this article on MAS Context.

Our proposal steps down the slope, fragmenting into different buildings and platforms, in order to maintain the largest amount of existing trees. It seeks to integrate them into the open spaces between the built volumes.

The main access to the compound is through the highest side of the site, the Camí Ral. At this point of access, the building detaches itself from the sidewalk and, taking advantage of the site’s topography, creates an entry patio to the school, where the largest saved pine tree is found. This patio becomes the most charged space of the school, a place for exchange and for meeting before and after class.

The program is divided between two clearly defined volumes. The main building of three levels holds the academic program: classrooms, workshops, administration, teachers and directors’ department and public library. The second building contains the sports program, auditorium and refectory, programs that can be open to the community for outside of class activities. Both buildings are connected by a small canopy which marks the entry to a series of patios of different character, sizes and levels.

Buildings have a semi-prefabricated concrete structure. The floor slabs are either of semi-prefab concrete panels or self-bearing double T concrete panels. Facades are also prefabricated panels tinted with a mixture of black and green, creating a patina that seeks to integrate the great building mass with the surrounding trees and oaks.

Authors: Emiliano López y Mònica Rivera

Collaborators: Franco Bechis, Bruno Bechis

Consultants:  Structural: BIS Arquitectes / Mechanical: PGI / Quality surveyor: AT-3 Oller-Peña s.c.p.

Area:  3.945,00 m2

Budget:  5.591.832,18 € PEC

Photography: © José Hevia