An Urban Stitch
For over 2000 years the residents of Barcelona have maintained a relationship to the Besos River. However, modern intervention has transformed this gathering place into a divider that bisects the site, and creates a rip in the urban fabric. The focus of this project was to address this tear, and re-stitch the communities of Badelona and Besos, as well as re-establish a relationship between the inhabitants and the river.
The first design intervention was developed through a series of paths woven across the river. This weave of spanning planes created as a series of physical links between the communities. The spaces that resulted within this weave were free-form and non-prescriptive in nature and thus an inherent programmatic flexibility was established, creating a variety of public and private spaces.
Additionally, adoption of this weaving strategy produced a movement system that was also non-prescriptive as the sequence along the paths was decidedly non-linear. As a result, movement through this intervention was analogous to a process of architectural filtration, as occupants choose how they would weave their way through the planes and experience the various spatial relationships.
A residential complex was developed on the river basin. Vertical monoliths formed the structural basis for the stitch, and were created through a vertical weaving of individual residential units. The modular nature of these pre-manufactured concrete shells permitted a multitude of weaving patterns, as individual units could be stacked in a variety of interlocking arrangements. However, regardless of pattern, the configuration of the units always maintained a sectional relationship, whereby the roof of one unit became the balcony of another, or formed the entry vestibule for the unit below. The resultant outcome of this weave was a self-propagating and prototypical building form that could propagate along the river basin.
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Arnold Chan, Jason Mudry, Greig Rasmussen are MArch students, and Cam Christiansen is a Industrial Design student at the University of Calgary