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MBIArch Notes: Igualada Design Studio

Architectural Design

A couple of weeks ago, David Adjaye was in Barcelona to deliver the first BIArch Open Lecture of of the Spring term, but also to review student work for the Design Studio he is directing for the the first edition of the MBIArch Master in Architecture. Adjaye’s studio, supported by Manel Bailo and Alexa Plascencia, focuses on the regeneration of an obsolete industrial area close to the historic center of the city of Igualada.

The studio’s aim is to take advantage of the current industrial enthusiasm the area is experimenting –with the growth of new, dynamic, local companies such as Sita Murt (fashion), Munich (sneakers), or Ultramagic (hot air balloons)— to improve the current quarter (Adoberies Velles) and its articulation within the urban tissue. Adoberies Velles exemplifies the difficult relationship between the urban formalization of an outdated nineteenth-century mode of production and the growth and changing needs of our contemporary urban environment. The studio tries to provide an answer to that situation, and students’ work is expected to draw a possible future for development.

Like the Design Core Studio, the Igualada studio takes into consideration many of the conceptual frames undertaken during the first semester, particularly in the Urban Studies seminars (such as the accommodation of industrial and tertiary activities in twenty-first-century urban milieus) as well as issues of labor, morphology, or the intimate relationship between art and city that were central to the History and Theory courses.

David Adjaye’s participation in the studio provides the leverage and optimism that are necessary to join all of these concerns and reflections under a single paradigm, helping MBIArch students articulate an internationally-minded response to a local problematic.

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