Why Art Project

ITINERARY

Vicente Guallart and María Díaz won the Europan 2, "Living in the city” in 1991 on the site of Valencia (E).
Vicente Guallart opened a studio in Barcelona in 1992. He works in the confluence of architecture, nature and new technologies. For him, architecture must inject energy in a place. Nowadays, with new technologies, the role of architects is to construct complex geometries, artificial natures that create hybrid habitable environments. Some of his more relevant projects are the Denia Mountain (reconstruction of an old quarry, in an environment that hold and old Arab castle, selected for the Venice Biennale 2004), three ports in the North of Taiwan that will improve the tourism in the island (winners of two international competitions), or the Sharing Tower in the neighborhood of la Torre in Valencia.
He spent part of his time with research and educational projects as director of the new Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona, that hold a international postgraduate program on architecture and urbanism working in many scales “from bits to geography”

SHARED SPACES

Sharing is part of digital culture and makes individuals and the societies stronger and more effective. Sharing generates structures in which the fundamental thing is not the property, but its use, fomenting the emergence of the urban and the development of the collective intelligence.

Valencia (E) - Tour partagée

Sociópolis is a project that promotes the construction of housing that responds to the needs of the new types of family unit, in a quality urban setting in. The tower, a hybrid programme, includes 250 rental apartments, an arts centre and a technology centre. The ground floor is articulated around a public plaza that will serve to put on events in an urban setting that is at once open and delimited. In keeping with the principles of the shared space, this project generates a variety of types of shared housing, on the basis of the ages and optimum living conditions of the occupants.

INTERACTION

The projects respond to a specific place, at a specific moment in time. These are actions that set out to create open structures for the use of their inhabitants. The architecture must inject energy in the place, it has to stimulate its latent forces. Never reduce it or paralyze it.

Cambrils (E) - By the sea

These buildings, in squared plan, project themselves according to new space organisations and functions with the objective of profiting the maximum the sea location of the site. The relation between the rooms and the terrace that surrounds them, conceives to enhance and enlarge each apartment. By folding doors and curtains, terraces can be used as circulation. kitchen and bathrooms look over exterior. The relation between the interior skin and the exterior is made through coloured glasses.

MICROCOAST

If the coast is no longer beautiful, perhaps we still have microcoasts. The length of a coastline, as Mandelbrot demonstrated, is infinite. A project is neither large or small, but intense or boring. Nature stimulates us to learn from her, in order to understand her structural principles.

Vinaroz (E) - Marine promenade

The marine promenade is the urban centre of the city, the place where the citizens meet and where they relate to the ocean. The proposed arrangement solves the contradictions produced between the urban functions happening in the boarder line as well as it’s access condition to the beach and its condition of stay and relax. Giving the priority to the pedestrians, in the use of this space submerges the automobiles to certain restrictions, without bothering the intense use of the site.

MOUNTAIN

If the architecture is the landscape, buildings are mountains. Nowadays, with our new techniques we can construct complex geometries, artificial natures that create hybrid habitable environments that are also complex and stimulating.

Denia, Alicante (E) - Cultural Park

The principal new construction project is a multifunctional centre in the quarry adjacent to the castle that will restore the original volumetry of the hill. The geological structure of the hill offers a mineralogical system that will guide its functioning. The effort has been concentrated on developing a system that will respond to the logic of the internal structure that permits multiple movements across the skin, following various slopes, and in this way creating a system of multiple itineraries. The interior is organised around three focuses of functional attraction that define spaces for social interaction: an agora; an auditorium; a bathing SPA

Europan Generation, The reinterpreted city Catalogue
Editions: Cité de l’architecture and Europan, May 2007
224 colour pages, bilingual English/French


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