Infrastructural Landscapes
Following the long-established Western dichotomy of the natural versus artificial, landscape and infrastructure have been considered traditionally as oppositional conditions. Within this dualism, architecture could be defined as what is neither landscape nor infrastructure. While is a purely technocratic and purpose-based regime, architecture is a cultural discipline that bridges technology and the arts.
The disciplinary separation of knowledge, protocols, and techniques between those three fields of practice was still respected until Postmodernism in the 1980’s. Yet since the beginning of the 1990’s, with the shift of focus from representation to performance in the architectural discourse, the experimentation with new forms of synthesis between architecture, infrastructure, and landscape has constituted one of the most fertile grounds for rethinking architectural practice – defining a realm of combined natural and artificial ecologies with multiple sets of performances.
The RS3 studio will engage in an area in Barcelona where conditions of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape encounter and intermingle intensively. The studio will investigate how recreation as activity of consumption (of services, experiences, etc.) can potentially be associated with landscape features that deal with logistics demands (infrastructure). In particular, students will explore new forms of such artificial, recreational ecologies where the condition of production (of energy, etc.) will play a central role beyond consumption and play.
In front of the neighborhood of Poble Nou, The Ronda (peripheral freeway) leaves an urban scar that cuts the relationship between the city and the beach. Although the Ronda was initially planned as it is, the topographic differences (between the actual road level and the city) open the possibility to cover it, creating a new infrastructure for recreation and production that reconnects the city with the beach. The geometric variation of the Ronda, together with the extensive length of the project, will conceptually be addressed as a potential implementation of parametric design approaches. Students will explore how variable structural elements may not only resolve the specific task of covering the road, but also create an overall landscape of infrastructures that is visible from the Ronda and usable from the city. Moreover, students will be required to develop design proposals that are ultimately linked to advanced methods of construction, thinking their proposals at multiple scales of resolution, from the large scale structural elements to the small detail of pavement and urban furniture.
