Architecture Of Barcelona Research Articles

The feminist perspective as a counterpoint in the architecture of Anna Bofill (1977–1996)

The vast and plural production of the woman architect, musician, activist, occasional educator and tireless researcher Anna Bofill Levi (Barcelona, 1944) is characterized by certain features that make its author a unique personality, although one hardly known and recognized in the Spanish and international circles that are the custodians of prestige in architecture. She has achieved most public recognition as a composer, the field in which she has been most productive over time and developed the furthest. Her music is characterized by the number of references, especially contemporary, she includes, the wide diversity of countries where it has been performed, and the range of people to whom she has dedicated her works, all these aspects testifying to her cosmopolitan and libertarian spirit and her commitment to equality. Her incessant writing, with all the reading it entails, has also left us with a large body of written work, extending over a number of fields, including most notably her reflections on the influence of the gender-based perspective on urban planning. A factor also reflected in her architecture, for example, in the implementation of participatory processes in her project designs. She joined the Taller de Arquitectura from the time she began her studies at the School of Architecture in Barcelona in 1964—she graduated in 1972—, and then commenced her independent career in 1981, although her first solo works date from 1977. Her work at the head of her office for almost 20 years is evidence of a tireless capacity for work and an unwavering commitment to people's welfare. This paper analyses Anna Bofill's contributions to feminist thinking through her work as an architect. Also, it addresses the study of a cultured person, a woman with great sensitivity and a strong political and personal commitment who has suffered discrimination and who has made rigor and determination the means to achieve her non-negotiable freedom.

Beyond formal and informal: mid-twentieth-century residential architecture in Barcelona’s El Carmel neighbourhood

Abstract This article discusses houses on the periphery of Barcelona and in particular in the El Carmel neighbourhood, which were built by poor country-to-city migrants from southern Spain in the post-World War II period. They were constructed following two typologies: barracas (sheds), one-storey huts on an irregular street plan, and coreas (‘Korea houses’), more formally looking one- to three-storey structures lined up on orderly laid-out streets. Based on archival documents, contemporaneous publications and interviews with former autoconstructores (self-builders), the article analyses both social conditions and physical structures. While these buildings were often unauthorized and constructed by informal means, they were just as often built with the landowner’s consent, involving architects and building professionals, and retroactively legalized. The article concludes that in this respect Barcelona’s ‘informal neighbourhoods’ in fact straddled the realms of the formal and the informal, to the extent that the habitual distinction between formal and informal architecture has to be considered inadequate.

Containers

“Something for Nothing”, pause containers, container buildings and other interpretations of the category “Containers” were raised for the first time by the XIX Congress of Architecture in Barcelona as a topical problem of the profession. The representation of architecture as a container, when the form does not follow the function at all, and the content actually becomes a replaceable and transformable filling, changes the traditional ideas about the impossibility to transfer the content of a work into another Form.The ideology of hybrid spaces and flexible offices, the need for reconstruction/modernization of historical and industrial buildings and structures, renovation and gentrification of degrading environments and objects give special importance to the discussion of the “container” as an ongoing discourse of the profession.

Crossed destinies: the tectonic and modern architecture in Barcelona during 50’s-60’s

The tectonic as theoretical subject was carried on in the nineteenth century in the context of German culture and concerns the relationship between form and construction, focusing on the analysis of the correspondences between the constructive and static needs and the intents addressed to aesthetics. In Barcelona, oppressed by Francoism during the ‘50s and ‘60s, the will to be modern was expressed to a considerable extent through the reinvention of a language characterised by a successful synthesis between modernity and attention to local culture. Therefore the tectonic is an investigative tool that links the culture of Barcelona’s design with the broader koinè of modernity that has made tectonic one of its fundamentals. As in Italo Calvino’s novelist The Castle of crossed destines where different tales intersect, and the tellers are prompted by the symbols of a pack of cards so even in Barcelona the representative strength of Architecture interweaves with theoretical texts about tectonic providing a wider horizon to understand Barcelona architecture in the modern age.

International Biennial of Landscape Architecture of Barcelona. A COVID-19 adapted 11th Edition

International Biennial of Landscape Architecture of Barcelona. A COVID-19 adapted 11th Edition

Simulacra architecture in relation to tourism: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona

ABSTRACTAn increasing global competition between cities encourages many of them to find ways to promote and develop a unique identity and increase their attractiveness as a tourist destination. Some cities may develop and promote an emblematic architect and his or her architectural heritage/legacy, like the examples of Glasgow and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Barcelona and Antonio Gaudi. Furthermore, this article will focus on the way tourism can lead local actors in cities to go even further and to continue to build their architecture, even after the death of the architects. A phenomenon appears where architecture is posthumously continuing to be built, leading to the production and creation of simulacra and facsimiles (for example of Mackintosh architecture in Glasgow and Gaudi architecture in Barcelona) for tourist, commercial and heritage reasons. This article aims to present and discuss how architectural heritage can be produced and transformed ‘for’ and ‘by’ tourism, a fascinating change in these cities which has also been the subject of criticism and leads to many questions.

BIONIC ASPECTS IN CREATIVITY OF ANTONIO GAUDI

The article is devoted to the creativity of the prominent Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi y Cornet (1852–1926). The individual stories of his life largely determined his choice of future profession. The main stages are described for his professional education at the University and the Higher School of Architecture in Barcelona. Shown are his stylistic preferences in the world architecture and design, the specific features of his construction activities. Only the two most famous projects by Antonio Gaudi y Cornet on the urban development are considered. Their design is performed in the Catalanian art Nouveau (Modernisme) in combination with elements of bionic architecture. Among them is the Park Güell in Barcelona (1900–1914) and Colonia Güell Crypt, Santa Coloma de Cervelló (1898–1917.). The latter playes the role of scientific and experimental laboratory, in which Antonio Gaudi y Cornet searched for the original bionic forms and made constructive decisions, including the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Barcelona, which was his career.

Modernist architecture in Barcelona reveals a new trace fossil from the Miocene of Montjuïc (NE Spain)

A new ichnotaxon, Lapillitubus montjuichensis n. i gen. n. isp., is described from the middle Miocene (Serravallian) of Montjuic mountain (Barcelona, northeastern Spain). This ichnotaxon consists of a horizontal to vertical, cylindrical burrow with an agglutinated lining exclusively composed of lithoclasts. Lapillitubus montjuichensis is interpreted as the result of the burrowing activity of a deposit- or suspension-feeding annelid worm. This new ichnotaxon extends the record of the informal group known as clast-armored or agglutinated trace fossils. In addition, since part of its type material is located in the blocks that make up the facades of several modernist buildings in the city of Barcelona, this new ichnotaxon highlights the importance of fossils in urban settings for those cases in which natural outcrops are reduced, restricted or even missing.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES : MILÀ–BARCELONA, URBANISME ALS ANYS CINQUANTA–SEIXANTA DEL SEGLE XX

It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times. In the 1950s and the 1960s, while Catalan culture tried to re-emerge from the disaster of war, architecture in Barcelona found a reference in the architecture of Milan to re-establish the interrupted modernism and Europeism. Contact among architects was continuous, and the design solutions were mutually enriching, producing a significant episode for European architecture. This article is part of a study in which the authors compare architectural works from the immense collection produced in these decades. The aim is to explore the relationship between town planning in Milan and Barcelona and its key role in the creation of the great modern metropolis. Between 1950 and 1960 Barcelonian architects, keen to create culture close to or belonging to the Grup R, had few occasions to be involved in urban design. In typological terms, more attention was given to building type than to urban type. However, in Milan the events related to the INA-House Plan ...

Image , Ritual and Urban Form: Porto in the 16th Century

In the early 17th Century, the Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco railed against his apprentices, telling them that the image should stand out of the picture. The topic was the one most debated in the art of the Counter-Reformation, whose main directives, outlined in the Council of Trent, would be put in motion simultaneously with urban "Christianisation". They presupposed a social contract, established between producer and receiver, implying maximum clarity of the message, which involved an ambiguous grey area that would be reserved for the outside of the focus. In painting, which sacrificed everything that was incidental or extraneous to the story, showing the essential and neglecting the accessory, the binary radicalism of the concept became more explicit, through the Caravaggian illumination or in the case above, the Spanish tenebrism of Velásquez, to whom Pacheco's admonition was addressed. In our Doctoral Thesis presented at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, we sought to demonstrate that the Plastic Arts were not the only field for the application of Luminist principles. In this article we aim to summarise this thesis by exposing the important relationships between image, ritual and urban form in 16th Century Porto, after a time, therefore, the late Middle Ages, which Huizinga classified as deeply iconophile , in which image and ritual were put at the service of the reformulation of a State becoming increasingly centralised and interventionist, whose action extended to the sphere of the Church: with King João II, and especially King Manuel I, the Crown was an active sponsor of religious reform that was pursued with redoubled energy and systematisation, from the reign of "the Pious", then already within the political system of close bilateral cooperation that was designated the Confessional State. We therefore believe that this type of approach to anthropological and symbolic components, which seeks to take into account the increasing importance that is given in contemporary research on the city's history, can be very fruitful.

Architecture libraries in Catalonia

Two of the largest architecture libraries in Spain are in institutions in Catalonia. One of these is the UPC (the Technical University of Catalonia), the home of the library of the ETSAB (the School of Architecture of Barcelona), which is one of the oldest architecture schools in Spain. The other is COAC (the Architects’ Association of Catalonia), which boasts one of the biggest architecture libraries in a professional association in the country. While these two libraries were built up in the 19th century, other architecture libraries have been created in Catalonia in the 20th century, both in schools of architecture and in the branches of COAC.

GENEALOGÍA DE LA ARQUITECTURA CONTEMPORÁNEA EN CATALUÑA: HIJOS DEL 92

This article, rich in detail, provides an overview of architecture in Barcelona in the wake of the 1992 Olympics and, by extension, a “recent genealogy of modernity.” Although the emphasis falls on younger, less established architects and architectural teams, the authors provide a critical review—via reference to rhe avant-garde legacy of the GATCPAC (Grup d’Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l’Arquitectura Contemporània)—of the Grup R, Oriol Bohigas and the “Escola de Barcelona,” Óscar Tusquets, Albert Viaplana, Helio Piñón, and others. Centered on architecture, the article also engages concurrent developments in lirerature, painting, and film. In its attention to smaller works wavering between the contrasting if complementary values of seny and rauxa, it provides a critical take on the penchant for large emblematic structures by (often foreign) architectural superstars.