Saturday, March 31, 2007

Finally: The Field Trips: Madrid and Andalucia

A Synopsis

So Field Trip 1 was our introduction to Spanish architecture and culture outside of Barcelona. We visited Madrid and parts of Andalucia, including Toledo, Cordoba, Granada, and Seville.
Looking back on it, I think that this field trip was one of the most exciting and eye-opening parts of the semester so far: we were all still new to Spain (let alone Europe), and we were still wide-eyed, brashly foreign (more so than now, at least), and we were all still getting to know eachother.
What I realized during this time: Barcelona is perhaps a little less typically "Spanish" than many, if not most, of Spain. This, I think is primarily due to the fact that it is the capital of Catalunya (Catalunya wants independence from Spain), and due to the fact that there is such a tradition of change and push towards modernity in Barcelona...which I think is rooted in the modernista architecture movement. I'll explain more of this later.

Anyway, getting back to the field trip. There were Americans everywhere. We infilitrate everything (this is not always a good thing) Next: Spain seems to be on a fast track towards mdernization, while still preserving architectural traditions. This really made me happy! There were construction projects in almost everywhere we visited, most notably installation of a new tram system through Sevilla, which actually had diabled most of the major streets in the area where we were staying. I was so happy to see that old buildings were being preserved and their exteriors were kept clean. This was prominent in Madrid.

All in all, Field Trip 1 was an amazing time for all of us CUA archies. We returned back to Barcelona breathless (switching planes, trains, and busses quickly for a week started to get to us), feet sore (we walked EVERYWHERE), all partied out...(the clubs were awesome), architecturally more exposed, and ready to re-emerse ourselves in a city that was beginning to be a home-away-from-home.

A typical sight in Southern Spain: orange trees!! There are some groves in Barcelona, but not as many as in Andalucia. We found out the hard way that the oranges were really sour.


Sean, Brian, Felipe, and Monica looking suave in Madrid.



Looks can be deceiving. This plate of food I ate in Cordoba was actually some of the most delicious tapas I've had since I've been in Spain.

Read on more recaps of each city.

Monday, March 5, 2007

The Image of the City Part 4: Shore and the Forum area

What a day for a picture.........................................................................................................A couple weeks ago Sean, Billy, and I went down to the waterfront and walked from around Port Olympic to the Forum area. Port Olympic is the former industial waterfront that was demolished and transfromed into 2 miles of beaches for the 1992 Olympics. What was formerly a ragged indusrial area became seaside hotels and restaurants. There are still some industrial buildings there, but now there are additional attractions.
Looking forward to the warm weather..

Below: photos from the plaza near the Forum building. In the mid 90's the World Cultural Forum, a worlwide convention to discuss international relations, was held in Barcelona, and a very conceptual, eccentric building was built (I don't have pictures of this up yet...I will, though). Although the space pictured below was designed to bring people together for the conference and afterwards, I thought it was a rather uninviting and disfunctional; the lack of people inside it support my opinion...it was still really cool to walk through and photograph.
Sean and Billy playing. Aw.
Some of the new apartment buildings that line the costal area..

The Image of the City Part 3.2: Old Town: La Rambla

See, Buy, Sell, Drink, etc. etc.La Rambla the large tree lined avenue in the western part of Old town. It is busy at all hours of the day, and you can buy almost anything on/ around it. Above, La Rambla at night, lit up during the Dia de los Tres Reyes celebrationsMost buildings on La Rambla are lit up at night.

The "statued" street performers are popular

The entrance to the wax museum is on La Rambla

Another street performer

Aww..I really wanted a pet here in BCN

Near the entrance to La Rambla

The Image of the City Part 3.1: Old Town: Barri Gotic

W E L C O M E Old town is Barcelona, and Barcelona is Old Town. Although I have only lived in Barcelona for 2 months (as of yesterday!), I think Old Town makes Barcelona that amazing city that it is. Makes sense.
Old Town is one of the most extensive medieval city centers in Europe, and includes some major Barcelona sites. First is the Barri Gotic (the Gothic Quarter), the true heart of Barcelona. It contains the Barcelona Cathedral, a maze of windig streets and placas, El Born neighborhood, the Santa Maria del Mar church, and is bounded by the beautiful Parc de la Ciutadella (which houses the city zoo :) The Barri Gotic is where to find funky/ trendy shops (GREAT place for vintage clothing) and cool cafes and restaurants.
The seafront is considered part of Old Town and includes the recently (relatively recent..1992) created Olympic Port. The biggest attraction in Old Town may be LA RAMBLA, the city´s main avenue, which is replete with restaurants and shops, and where you can almost always see some street performer or buy flowers of small animals.A view from the top...we took a tour on the roof of Barcelona Cathedral

Above: A tower at Palau Reial, a 14th century palace in the Barri Gotic. The Barri Gotic was the site chosen by the Romans between 27 BC-AD 14 as the site to found a new colony, and is still where the city´s governmental buildings are. Placa Juame (a focus of my first project) is in the Barri Gotic.
Old Town: new and old come together.
A view of Palau Reial from Placa del Rei, its outiside square
Old Town knows how to get it right...me in front of Victoria Bar

Pretty.

Inside Barcelona Cathedral

Studio Projects Recap

This post is about what we've all been doing in studio so far this semester (beleive it or not, sight-seeing isn't all we're here for)...

URBAN PLANNING!
This studio has been our first shot at urban planning. Throughout this semester, we are progressing through various steps to create a new design for a large but unsusccessful central Barcelona plaza called Placa de les Glories. Placa de les Glories ("Glories") is a large public square that occurs at the intersection of the three most important traffic ways of the city: Gran Via, Diagonal, and Meridiana. Athough it has existed from the time of Cerda's original planning of Exiample in 1859, Glories has never integrated itself well within the city as a major public center, as was intended. Since its creation, there have been continued efforts to recreate Glories so that it satisfies its original objective, but so far none have been successful.



Left, an aerial image of Glories Plaza. The streets:
Runnng upper left to lower right is Diagonal

Running upper right to lower left is Meridiana

Running horizontally left to right is Gran Via



Why is Glories unsuccessful?

Placa de les Glories does not work well as an urban center for a variety of reasons. Primarily:
Various pieces of the plaza lack cohesion. A two level segregation of circulation occurs where the three roads meet, which disrupts circulation flows from minor surrounding Eixample streets. Circulation is further impeded where areas within the plaza are divided for railway traffic. Inside circular center is an empty area intended as greenspace, but which fails to draw people, due to it surrounding mess of streetway, railway, and awkward street arrivals from the Cerda scheme. Further exacerbating the problems that insufficient circulation imposes, a disparity of scales, created by the Agbar Tower by Jean Nouvel fragments the area and makes reading the urban fabric compicated.

Where is Glories?
Glories is at an intersection with the Eixample and the industrial sector if the city towards the south, near the shore. Diagonal is connector between the moutnains to the north, and the industrial ports and budding district of Sant Marti/ Poble Nou to the south. In addition, Glories occurs within a green diagonal along Meridiana that passes through the TGV railway station to the northeast.

What about Glories is worth the transformation?

Why are we trying to save Placa de les Glories? Glories has a lot of potential to be a major central space for Barcelona: 1. Its vertices are important; its location above the area of Poble Nou, its proximity to TGV station, and its location along Diagonal (connector between the moutains and the industrial seaports) make it a point of possbility. 2. Its location along a current green corridor makes it a possible location for a green node. 3. Glories location along the 3 major traffic veins makes it a possible intercommunicaion node.

First Things First

Eventually, everyone in our studio will individually design one building within a freshly (and successfully) designed Glories Square. Before that, we are taking on the task of replanning the square in order to make it compatible with the exisiting urban fabric.

How do we even take on the task of redesigning a plaza?

In order to understand how a plaza may be successful, we first studied existing plazas within Barcelona. For our first project, in groups of two we picked three major Barcelona plazas and created concept boards that described how each plaza evoked feelings within the visitor. Understanding the quality of a plaza helped us identify what urban aspects may be successful or unsuccessful.

The theme for my group's three concept boards was duality. For each plaza that we studied, we noticed that there existed at least two contrasting situations that depended on the surrounding area and the addition of architectural elements.


Left, Placa Juame Concept Board.
Placa Juame is a governmental center, intermingled with shops and cafes. Many visitors gather in this area. Why are some parts more densely packed than others? My partner in this project, Sean Owens, and I noticed that people tended to stay away from the areas flanked by governmental buildings, because of intimidating guards that stood watch by them.
Duality: comfort vs. discomfort as it affects pedestrian gathering


The governmental offices are colored red, the commercial ones are colored blue.







Left, Placa Reial concept board.


In Placa Reial, there are two distinct feelings of comfort and discomfort. One is comfortable in the open area near the fountain, and one is uncomfortable in the arched arcade, where shady people hang out....



Rambla de Raval is a long plaza in old town Barcelona that was created when a few blocks were torn down in an area near Sant Antoni Boulevard. In an effort to improve a diminishing area and allow greater views and open space into what were previously dark, narrow corridors, Rambla de Raval became a new place for locals to gather and use as a segway between parts of old town Barcelona.

In Rambla de Raval, there is a duality between calm and busy pedestrians. Along the middle of the rambla, many people pass through quickly as they head to other parts of old town. Palm trees line the outskirts, along each side of the rambla, and locals gather in these areas. Our board shows this duality using a meaphor of a highway flanked on either side by a calm beach.

Why?
Like I've mentioned before, we analyzed and created concept boards in order to understand how site and placed architectural elements affect the aura of a plaza, and in turn, one's experience.

Getting to Work: Placa de les Glories Massing

The first step in our design transformation of Glories was to redesign the city blocks within the plaza. Only designing basic forms and organization of builidngs is called massing. Designing massing first is necessary in order to get a general i dea of what will occur in a space before details, sucha as facades and pedestrian pass throughs, etc. can be designed.
We worked in groups of three this time, and after analyzing existing conditions that demonstrate problems with the current Glories (circulation difficulties, fragmentation of spaces), we developed a goal for the reorganization.

Left, some of my group's analysis of the major traffic veins that pass through Glories. To the left is a larger scale view, and the images on the right are at a smaller scale.

After our analysis, my group came ot the conclusion that we could characterize the current state of Glories as "segregated" and that our goal is to create integration on this site. A couple weeks before we really started to focus on the massing transformation, Eric Jenkins, a professor back at CUA, came to visit and we had a discussion about some literature he had given us to read and learn about urban design. From our discussion and the readings, it became apparent that some of the most successful urban design results from integration of uses within a city; when residential, commercial, and governmetal environments are mixed, the best results come forth. For example, in some of Barcelona's best plazas, comercial spaces occupy the lower floors or apartment buildings. From this, my group decided that it would be best to integrate uses in our design. We did this by:

1. Mingling built spaces into what the city had anticipated as a very large open area. By partially building in the central area of Glories, open and built space would combine.
2. Mingling green space along the green passage that occurs along Meridiana, and surrounding the central space
3. We decided to prioritize Diagonal in order to facilitate pedestrain movement and emphasize the passage from the mountains to the sea
4. We created a heirarchy of building heights (an initial increase from the exisiting Cerda blocks, then a gradual decrease towards the center of the plaza) to inform the visitor about the site and to relate to the large scale of Jean Nouvel's Agbar Tower.


First, we created a small scale site model, we open areas cut out for where we will design.

My group made this model out of wood.





Left, notes and ideas about massing and what would be appropriate for our design.

Below, a board on the left showing Glories' existing conditions, and a board to the right with our plans for massing shaded in black.














Left, a larger scale site model. Our massing model in the ligher chipboard in the center.





Left, a closeup of our massing model placed on the site. You can see how Diagonal (running top left to bottom right) is prioritized, with nothing interrupting its path.

Now
We are about to move on the the block scale; that is, we will focus individually on designing the buildings for one block of our redesigned Placa de les Glories. After our field trip to Rome, we will work on the architectural scale and individually design floor plans and facade details for only one building.








Mira!

Barcelona, Spain
I am currently a junior at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. This blog documents my experiences as an American architecture student studying in Barcelona for a semester.