401_Competition Design Studio

Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia

We got a special tour yesterday of Antoni Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia. With our VIP hardhats we got a chance to go where no other tourists can - to the top.



preparing for the climb

the only way up

half way there and the views are amazing

looking down

"looks like candyland" :-)

almost there, looking up at the ceiling

the furthest anyone can go so far, 100 meters

Gaudi

circa 2060 A.D.

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion

hi,

today we went to the Barcelona Pavilion instead of sitting in a sweaty classroom. we got a pretty cool tour from one of the main brains behind the reconstruction. i even gotta pretty nice mouse pad. check the pics.

Second Project

finally over! probably THE toughest project ever assigned to me. it seemed like everything that could go wrong, did. problems came about ranging from the always-disagreeable group work, narrow timing, and blank stares, but when you also throw a Spanish midterm into the equation, it becomes a disaster.

the task – start filling in the blocks of our proposed section of Plaza Glories. zooming into the site a little bit, we were split up into four groups of three where we were to use the emotive knowledge learned in the previous project while also applying the raw analysis collected from the site to create new ‘footprints’ for the blocks surrounding the plaza. an assignment which could have literally taken a semester to complete was placed in our hands and we were given a time table of about two weeks. given – we had three people per group, that’s still a lot of thinking. and even after that thinking, there had to be a group decision to move anywhere beyond just a thought.

after long days and nights of doing analysis and just sitting and talking to the other group members, the conclusion finally came about to designate Plaza Glories as the new art center of Barcelona.

the goal – allow complete access of the different art sectors surrounding the plaza (musical arts, graffiti arts, media/new age arts, architecture, and also taking into consideration the green corridor) while catering to the human scale of Eixample, but integrating the more contemporary design of the up-and-coming Poblenou district. sounds like a lot? yea….

but all in all, it was pretty cool. sean, billy, and i all had some very interesting ideas and it was more interesting how all of our main concepts (hybrid building types, looking at green space in section, and connectivity) all formed into creating barcelona’s new art center. and the spanish midterm wasn't that bad.


our site, Plaza Glories. we're responsible for everything within the red dotted line.


diagram showing the different art sectors surrounding our site. purple - Eixample (architecture), pink - theaters (musical arts), red - industrial (graffiti art), orange - Poblenou (media/new age arts), green - green space corridor


crunching out blocks the night before with the help of some wings :-)




the final product

First Project

Abstract plaza analysis - We were broken into groups of two and given three plazas per group. Meg and I found the difference between passage and destination to be the most important concept of the spaces we chose. We chose to diagram in plan and and perspective because these views show the relationship between the plaza and the street the best. In the backgorund are washed out views of how the plazas connect with us emotionally.