Design III-IV. Morning

Professors

Jaime Coll López [R]
Estefania de Arrate Abaigar Albert Casas Álvarez            Cristina Gamboa Masdevall
Oscar Linares de la Torre              Ariadna Perich Capdeferro           Arnau Sastre Cuadri              Marc Subirana Ribera                  Antoni Vidal Jordi  

A-21, A-22, A-23, A-24, A-32,        A-33, A-34, A-35, A-14

Introduction

“I tend to believe that the types of houses have not changed from Antiquity to the present day, but this does not mean claiming that, in fact, the specific way of living has not changed since then, nor that there are not still new possible ways of living.”
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1966.

The third year of the architectural design studio studies the house. However, it does not study it solely from the perspective of types, but rather explores “new possible ways of living.” To this end, the course will investigate the relationships between the individual and the collective at three different scales: the internal relationships within the dwelling (the relationship between the body and space, spatial relationships and the use of those spaces, new users, and new family structures); the relationships within the building (collective-use spaces, the requalification of circulation spaces, cluster housing, temporary housing, etc.); and the urban relationship with the street and the neighbourhood (historical, social, and environmental context). In this order: from the inside out, from the individual to the collective.

“The dwelling of our time does not yet exist. Nevertheless, the transformation of our way of life demands its realisation. The prerequisite for its realisation is a clear definition of the current needs of our way of life.”                                                                              L. Mies van der Rohe, Program for the Berlin Building Exposition, 1931.

This will be the premise of the course: let us define the current needs of the way we want to live in order to search for the form of the dwelling in which we would like to build our lives. In the words of the writer and journalist Llucia Ramis in Un metre quadrat: “To be able to call it home. In something so basic, so vital, and today so difficult lies stability, upon which everything else is built.”

During the 2026–27 academic year, we will explore new ways of living in a medium-sized provincial city, Logroño, and the relationship established with the edges of a major infrastructure, the AVE high-speed railway (1st semester), as well as collective housing in Barcelona, through the reprogramming and vertical extension of an existing building in a high-density urban setting (2nd semester).

Program

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