ARCH_419 International Housing Studio: ‘Barcelona: La Barceloneta Port’

Working again within the framework of La Barceloneta explored in 2018, the 2019 studio proposed creating a new neighborhood between the consolidated urban grid and the port’s disconnected infrastructure. The goal was to engage the port’s everyday vitality with the pleasure of living in an urban, seaside context.

Each student’s proposal mediated the existing homes, fish market, and city infrastructure in dialogue with other students’ proposals. The space between the proposed buildings was crucial in framing the new community. Keeping in mind that the dimension and proportion of the remaining public open space defines the urban character of the new neighborhood, students proposed a sequence of public spaces linking transit from the city to the pier, a pedestrian-only area configured by public squares instead of streets.

This urban design methodology also served as a theoretical framework for developing the domestic interior spaces, understood as a sequence of rooms of varying sizes. Students avoided using passageways to link the rooms together, because “these thoroughfares were able to draw distant rooms closer, but only by disengaging those near at hand.” Where passageways were de rigueur, they were planned “as much like rooms as possible, with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. [They were] generous in shape, and always [had] plenty of light.” 

Units were developed as a matrix of different rooms, in which movement was produced by filtration, not canalization: occupants move through the domestic space by passing from one room to another. Each room had a series of latent uses derived from its size, intensity of light, quality of air, and above all the rooms adjacent to it. Starting with the notion that these rooms do not have predefined uses and may be freely interpreted by the users, the sequence of rooms becomes an extremely flexible matrix. “Almost every room, like a philosophical system, was in itself an entry, or passageway to other rooms, and systems of rooms—a whole suite of entries, in fact. Going through the house, you seem to be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods.