Architecture & Technology. Hybrid facilities

Professors

Òscar Linares de la Torre             Carol Beuter Sánchez

C-B9

Introduction

The Thematic Workshop Architecture and Technology. Hybrid Timber Facilities in European Urban Centres proposes an approach to architectural design based on the relationship between three fundamental dimensions: place, programme and tectonics. These three issues are not understood as successive phases of the design process, but rather as interdependent conditions, present from the very beginning, whose interaction progressively enables the construction of a coherent architectural proposal.

Place is approached as a physical, historical and cultural reality capable of informing and shaping the project. The exercises are situated in European urban contexts characterised by processes of transformation and by the presence of pre-existing architectures or infrastructures. Rather than replacement, the Workshop proposes working from what already exists, exploring how new interventions can establish specific relationships with what has already been built.

The programme is conceived through hybrid facilities that combine public, cultural, productive, educational, social or residential uses. Rather than responding literally to a functional list, the aim is to investigate the relationships between different activities and their capacity to generate new spatial organisations. The project thus emerges from the tension between type, understood as a formal and spatial structure with a vocation for permanence, and programme, which is necessarily contingent and susceptible to transformation over time.

Tectonics constitutes the third fundamental dimension of the Workshop. Design, technique and construction are not considered as independent issues, but as manifestations of the same architectural reality. Timber constitutes the main field of material and constructive experimentation, from the conception of the structure and envelope to the definition of space, detail and joint. The aim is not only to learn how to build with timber, but to understand how material and constructive decisions actively participate in the conception of architecture.

Workshop and Seminar are developed in a coordinated manner, combining design, case-study analysis, experimentation and constructive

Program