ARCH_500-600 Summer Studio Abroad in Barcelona: ‘Intersections’

It has been said that Barcelona is a city of lyrical profiles rather than epic movements. Year after year, this complex cacophony of light, architecture, and spectacle inspires students in the summer seminar and studio. Over eight intense weeks, meetings take place every day with studio activities, field trips, and presentations by local architects.

Projects and papers aim to engage the specific milieu of a paradigmatic European city through students’ eyes and experiences. Distances collapse, impressions abound, and conversations appear fluid and constant, in a rhythm that doesn’t slow down during the summer months. The affirmation of personal identities grows and expands in this unique city where deep traces of history and the pulsation of dynamic life collides with unusual force.

Students in this studio engage the architecture of the project with the architecture of the city: a dense urban fabric with narrow streets, unpredictable perspectives, and a place where everything is forced to coexist.

Rather than placing a building on the site, students instead worked with, from, through, and across it. In this sense, the studio focused on establishing different relationships between architecture and the city, always from the assumption that the project is more than an isolated freestanding object, but part of a complex condition. In Barcelona, the observer must be simultaneously aware of the natural, fluid transition from public to private domains, while staging the transition through a series of calibrated operations that architecturally define each episode.

Students’ active experience of the site, both what their senses registered as well as the factual data of its dimensions and setting, became the palimpsest with which a collage was created. Using the collage as a conceptual–compositional device, students engaged with the city through a subjective yet “visual/formal/fragmented/re-arranged” perception of it, where cacophonies abound. Like many European cities, downtown Barcelona exposes its layers: they are precisely what shows the full force of its character.

Students were encouraged to inhabit the place of intervention: to sketch it, photograph it, memorize it, register what caught their attention, rearrange what became important to them, and use this to guide and structure their initial ideas. Above all, students let their perceptions wander in the phenomena of this special place, and trusted their instincts to “jump” from an abstract intention to a formal response.