Architectural Design
The pressure brought to bear on design practices by advances in technical knowledge, along with the dissolution of the traditional tasks and instruments brought about by digital technologies is paradoxically leading to a lack of intensity in creative responses, erasing the capacity for true individual expression. Through its focus on architectural design, the MBIArch program will operate within this contemporary scene, resisting complacent design and pushing for a different architecture. Departing from a technical, scientific and anthropological standpoint, students will question contemporary attitudes towards the environment, while placing particular emphasis on the relationship between architecture and environment, as a source of design intelligence. In addition to the design core studio—the main studio running throughout the Spring semester—, a design seminar will cover four weeks of in-depth focus on architectural analysis and production. Students will select one studio option out of three in both the Core Design Studio and the Short Design Studio.Courses
Core Design Studios, Spring 2012
Labour, City, Form: Towards a Common Architectural Language (Pier Vittorio Aureli, Spring Term)
The design studio focuses on the relationship between the development of the modern city and the construction of political subjectivity from the Renaissance on. This relationship will be investigated from the point of view of the project of housing as the locus where architecture directly addresses its subject not only in terms of bare life, but also of ethos.
Thermodynamic Somatisms/ Verticalscapes (2) (Ábalos + Sentkiewicz, Spring Term)
The Core Studio will seek to consolidate an advanced understanding of high-rise construction in association with thermodynamics and to experiment with various somatic aspects of human behavior. The Studio will develop a spatial grammar and syntax associated with thermodynamics, through the definition of an operative bibliography, experimentation with zero energy-balance open and closed systems, the analysis of significant case studies associated with different technical fields, and a proposal for an operational grammar.
BCN DESIRE LAB (Pere Riera, Spring Term)
BCN DESIRE LAB is an experimental realm for the production of knowledge about change and the desire to inhabit. The two constitute contemporary emergences that provide an excellent learning opportunity. Although permanent change is part of the life cycle, the progressive acceleration of change eates a vertiginous situation characterized by a high level of uncertainty about an unexpected future.
Short Design Studios, Fall 2011
Spectral Process (Philippe Rahm, Fall Term)
Our design studio method could be described as spectral, in which space is decomposed into elementary particles, into wavelengths, humidity, light intensity and heat transfer coefficients, which are then reengaged into a new form, one more essential and contemporary. Yet our interest, the disintegration of the real and the recomposition of it with just two or three chemical and electromagnetic components, is necessary for the re-evaluation of the historical and fundamental reasons behind the human landscape which causes certain kinds of architecture, urbanization, and ways to develop territory.
Détournements (Cecilia Puga, Fall Term)
Détournements (Cecilia Puga, Fall Term)
In the studio Detournements, the students will construct a place and an event, about which we only have access to certain remains or outlines of architecture. With the aim of reusing these physical and cultural remnants, students will define personal intervention strategies, which they will use to express a new programmatic and material identity over the pre-existing and through acts of interpretation, detournement and juxtaposition.
Short Design Studio (Yoshiharu Tsukamto, Fall Term)
The short design studio will generate within the reading of the urban context a conceptual and critical framework that will structure the definition of an architectural calligraphy. The studio will juxtapose the logics and complexity of the site through the generation a catalog, and will promote new structures by reversing vernacular typologies into new architectural discourses.
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