Course: Description of the Course

Aims and Contents

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, provide a large range of opportunities to think upon landscape, 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 transform and improve some specific area by developing a plausible proposal from landscape until detail scale.

Aim: The complexity of landscape: territory and town

The workshop will introduce to the complexity of territory and town, to their common structure and to their specificities.

Working in successive approaches, from territorial scale to architectural scale, forth and back, will allow understanding the morphology of both the peri-urban and the urban landscape and their determining aspects: the power of hydrography, the impact of topography, the pressure of infrastructure, the influence of vegetation; and of course the incidence of the social 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 will be chosen strategically at the city border, in order to give the opportunity to saw the urban landscape to the less urbanized one. We will check in what amount the intervention on the site is capable to respond to this challenge, becoming a threshold between “built “and “unbuilt”.

The pedagogical aim is to get the skills and knowledge to be able to propose a joint between different landscapes: the densely populated, the less occupied, the so-called open landscape. The joint itself will include all kind of qualities: it will be a garden and a town, a sequence of open spaces and a sequence of “housing” typologies, and it will content all kind of public spaces and a number of facilities. In a way it will be at the same time a piece of territory and a simplified city, capable to support the discussion about the relation with other parts of the environment, 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: An advanced landscape and architectural design

The topic of the course consists in the re-generation of an area at the city border, by designing a park hosting a universal ecumenical cemetery with related facilities.

The typology of the cemetery varies from one place in the world to another. In Europe alone, we already find very different approaches to the issue; so adding our intercontinental students’ knowledge on the issue will provide us the incredible opportunity to develop a brand-new theme: how to design a memorial landscape that is able to accommodate anyone in harmony independent from origin, culture, language, colour, gender, religion, etc. Globalization of our world should also include sharing the memory for our beloved, as a specific contribution to peace.

While in the Mediterranean countries cemeteries often are enclosures containing sort of a town in smaller scale, with all kind of “residential” typologies and city-like public spaces, in other places in the world cemeteries are open gardens, orchards, forests, viewpoints, islands, etc.

Lectures' List

Lectures' Download

Related to the burial ceremonies and the further memory rituals, cemeteries include a row of facilities: farewell rooms, chapels and churches, morgue, crematory, mortuaries, shops (candles, flowers, gifts; tombstones, sculptures), cafeterias-restaurants, nursery garden, workshops, even small factories (monumental masonry), specialized library, archive, museum, not to forget about administration buildings, parking lot, etc.

Barcelona’s borders are defined by water as well as by slopes, at some places by both at once. In addition to the attention given to urban layout, built and void, spatial composition, etc., special attention will be paid to the work on shore and to the work on topography. Another issue to focus will be how to build with alive -and therefore changing- material.

The design is called to re-qualify the area from a physical, social and cultural point of view (requalification of the built, of the void and of the relationship with the existing landscape), according to different strategic decisions.

The themes to explore along the design process should be tightly connected with a ‘projective vision’ of the quality of the site, in relation to new uses, social environment and sustainable development. Careful reading and understanding of the place identity will be crucial to lead the design process to an integrated proposal.

As a transversal requirement the concept of sustainability will inform any decision taken. Non-sustainable architecture/urbanism is a paradox in itself (both attending the building process and the final result). Infrastructure and buildings should achieve solvency and comfort by passive means as much as possible.

By working both multi-scale and multi-use we pursue the integration of diverse components of our discipline: landscape, technology, structure, art.

We will start the course gathering information from all over the world: every student will present a case study of his/her country of origin explaining the funeral tradition by collecting and re-elaborating the available graphic information. Based on this material, complemented by some universal references on the topic, we will work out the concrete program for the Barcelona landscape cemetery. (The gathered information also is pretended to be the core of a publication; but this exceeds the course itself.)

Next step will be reading and understanding the site in relation to town and territory. The analysis should be tendentious, developed under a certain implicit idea of proposal. This part will be already done in groups.

The main section of the course will develop the project of a landscape cemetery from planning scale to architectural scale.

Interdisciplinary contributions

In coherence with the previous arguments the course contents will be completed deepening in specific themes, such as landscape aesthetics, landscape urbanism and land planning. These topics will be developed in an integrated way by the assistant teachers. The exhaustive work on these issues at the studio will be underlined by specific lectures and seminar-shaped discussions.

Structure: A theoretical and practical itinerary

The course will be shaped as follows:

- Learning-oriented basic thematic lectures;
- Applicative workshops, experimental applications, supported by case study experiments;
- Mid-term evaluations, referring to the project’s different stages of evolution.

- Related activities such as seminars and exhibitions.

- 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.

List

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The Site

The project area lies at the northwestern end of Barcelona, between the ancient road going to inner Spain in the south, and the end of Diagonal Ave traversing whole Barcelona from northeast to southwest. The intersection of these two outstanding highways is underlined by the crossing of the Barcelona outer ring road built on the score of the Olympic games 1992.

It is not by chance that this is also the place where Collserola, the mountain chain closing BCN at the north, arrives further south. For sure this southern corner of the massif was determining for the layout of the roads. Barcelona gently climbs from the seaside upwards until it arrives to Collserola, where slopes become so steep, that they stop or at least slow down the extension of the town.

The working area already announces the changing topography: it goes up in a still gentle, but a bit irregular way; and at the east it is cut off by a creek, originally collecting water from the mountains and nowadays fully urbanized.

Not only three important roads meet at the area and define it, but also three municipalities meet there. The strategic location determines the contradictory character of the site: being a “come together” place, it becomes a “bumping against” place, a no men’s land. The lack of urbanization, due to being a boundary to all three municipalities, is exactly the chance for our project.

Looking upon the close surrounding we discover that to the north the area is surrounded mainly by sport fields and a park. The building regulations have preserved it as a mostly open-air leisure belt. On the contrary, to the south it limits with a dense piece of city fabric, extending radially from a high school building. The contrast couldn’t be sharper.

The project has to work with this contrast, taking it as an opportunity. Cemeteries actually deal with both the idea of town (necropolis) and of park (garden, woodland). What character, what identity shall the new cemetery have? Shall it work as link between different tissues? Shall it work independently, establishing clear limits between the different pieces of town? Enclosure or open area? Condensing buildings or spreading them?

This is only a little sample of a large amount of questions that will arise.