An international network of urban research workshops
A fragment, a piece, an unfinished, or incomplete part of something. The fragmented thinking reveals the partial character of a learning process, always accumulative. New pieces are added to our knowledge, or sometimes subtracted, contradicting and destroying past portions.
Fragments of is a set of academic workshops held in cities that are interesting for its cultural, social and economic distance. These workshops seek to learn from these environments through the study of their fragments, portions of what they are, allowing the accumulative partiality build the understanding of the context.
Dates_ February-March, setting the beginning of the semester.
DURAtion_ Between 3 and 4 weeks.
NUMBER OF STUDENTs and PROFILE_ Between 15 and 20 Spanish students, as an ideal number, who will work with the students from a local university in the destination city, in order to create joint working groups in which students can learn and share knowledge, working tools, methodologies and ways of thinking while creating linkages among them.
locations_ For the moment, the network is active in Ahmedabad (India), where there have been two workshops in the last two years. The intention is to hold a workshop in Johannesburg (South Africa) over 2016 where relationships with universities, professionals and local actors have already been initiated. Besides repeating the workshop every year in the destinations where a relationship and the logistics have already been established, the ultimate goal is to keep on opening new destinations to configure a wider network and an offer of workshops that could give the students a richer range of experiences while serving as a worldwide platform to create links between professionals with the potential of creating new and unexpected collaborations.
gathering fragments_
Over a period of 3 to 4 weeks, the students travel to a city in a context of rapid growth and transformation, to study a particular urban fragment, defined by its physical and social environment or fragments. The understanding of the context requires the analysis of the factors that shape it: their culture, their values, their history, their beliefs and traditions, the technologies used, its legal framework, social structures, economy and business fabric, its urban configuration and means of transport, the types of built and unbuilt space, connections and edge conditions, energy resources and efficiency, its streets and the activity that it occurs throughout the day, throughout the year.
A workshop to think, from an open but foreign perspective, inside a new place. From inside but from outside through both local and foreign eyes. Looking for understanding in order to produce tailored approaches to the specific context and generate relationships of import and export of methodologies. The workshop aims to develop tools of analytical observation and management in complex processes of city building, with the student participation in collaborative processes of creating the environment and redefining the position of the architect in such participatory processes. It gives the opportunity to meet other approaches to different problems, and to gradually approach the
understanding of the living organism that is the city, always in process, always unfinished.
The goal of this activity is to create personal links with other parts of the world and its people. Ties that would be renewed every year generating cross and overlapping conversations over time. Once the relationship is created, each year the workshop can focus on a new piece of the city, a new fragment, you learn a little more, a little less, something different, contradictory, new.
This is a course that seeks to complement the training of the participant through a dialogued look to the exterior. An opportunity to develop a thorough analysis and initiate a project to continue later from a distance as an exercise, as a thesis project or as a personal research.
Fragments of offers the possibility of generating synergies and networking around the world. It is an opportunity to expand our capabilities and enrich our vision through contact with other ways of understanding reality. It is established as a platform to eliminate borders and bring people together in a field such as architecture and urbanism in which to maintain a global mind to act locally is therefore essential.
a methodology_
There are four basic pillars for understanding the structure of the workshop: experience, information, analysis and production. The process of studying the different urban fragments is articulated around this four foundations. While the importance of each of them ranges along the course of the workshop, they are all present in every stage.
Experience
The student is subjected to a shock through the discovery, experimentation and the tour around the new environments, cultures and ways of understanding reality, creating a context vision based on experience. Loss of prejudice and formation of opinions are promoted, with the premise of change and reformulation always present. This mainstay of the workshop is not intended to be an unequivocal weapon in which the student judge the new context, but rather a bidirectional resource where synergies occur both ways, from the context to the participant and the participant to the context.
Information
Through the contact and exchange of ideas with authoritative voices, among which are both local experts and external agents, the participant is exposed to other people’s positions and discover different realities to those experienced firsthand. The value of this foundation is to learn from people who are actively facing the context, either through action or reflection. These voices, which have enough experience and rigor to emerge as reference speakers will serve as a link and confrontation to the subjective experiences that are developed throughout the course of the workshop. It is during the early stages when these interventions are crucial, considering, however, that it requires the participants ability to put into question their own points of view and those of others, encouraging discussion and collective learning. Therefore, the information flow, although more intense at the beginning, must be constant and the attitude encouraged in the participants, critical and with emphasis on the debate.
Analysis
It is inherent to the process of understanding any circumstance the need of an exhaustive analysis, however, the desire to catalog, define, categorize and draw conclusions prevents us from respecting the timing of a process that, although starting from the first moment, must follow an organic pace. Leaning on the experience and the information pillars will make the participant flee from final analysis, to understand that part of the learning process is based on their ability to observe, analyze, discuss and re-think about the context. This foundation must be continuous throughout the workshop, with a peak halfway when it will be necessary to establish a number of analytical premises, always reviewable, to support the performance of the other three pillars.
Production
Active production allows to ask ourselves questions that we would only be able to arise after a longer period of reflexion. Therefore, due to the limited time available, there is an aim of encouraging participants to register from the first step, experiences, informations, and analysis in a steady stream of content with a variety of formats and forms of expression always looking for the best way to communicate (models, videos, installations, drawings, illustrations…). This is therefore a process in which “results” occur in real time. Unfinished parts are built, shared, published and exposed to a collective enrichment. Content production is therefore constant throughout the workshop, and it is only at the end when a “final” product appears, a state, a phase or stage that should be the result of restructuring all the fragments, produced, reviewed and curated by the participants themselves collectively.
Methodology in time: experience, information, analysis and production rythm
coordinators_
MARTA BADIOLA RAMOS has been trained as an architect and urban planner at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM, where she completed her Master’s degree, winning the COAM (Official School of Architects of Madrid) Award 2014 in the category of Urbanism with her Final Thesis Project, titled: OverWrite, re-thinking Madrid’s urban fabric. Marta has worked with TXT Arquitetos and the NGO Um Têto Para Meu Pais in Sao Paulo, Hassel Architects in Shanghai and Izaskun Chinchilla Architects in Madrid. Despite her young age Marta has already established her own practice, with interests in research, urbanism and the domestic scale, always with an international approach. She has been involved in the organization and teaching of several workshops in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Ahmedabad (India) and Struga (Macedonia).
JORGE PIZARRO MONTALVILLO is an architect and urban planner graduated at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ETSAM where he completed his Master’s degree in 2014 with honours in his Final Thesis Project under the title Ahmedabad: urban fabrics in conflict. He has collaborated with architectural practices like Estudio SIC and HUSOS Architects, developing projects in Madrid and at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Recently, he has been involved in a research about In-stitutional and Ex-titutional Real Estate Processes in Madrid in collaboration with Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas and PAH Madrid (a platform for the affected by mortgages) within the ARCHIPRIX 2015 Workshop where he leaded a group of international students.