SHORT PORTFOLIO
Miriam Roure Parera is a research fellow at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, an architect interested in the creative application of technology within the built environment. Miriam holds degrees from Harvard University (MArchII) and Cornell University (BArch). In 2009, she joined the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, where she worked as part of their creative think tank division, on projects that demanded applied architectural thinking, within and beyond built form. At Harvard, she explored the overlaps between design and technology, which led her to intern at Continuum Innovation in 2012 and to organize the first Harvard xDesign Conference in 2013. Miriam’s work has been published in A+U, FRAME, Harvard Publications, Dezeen, Archinect and other online platforms. She has received several awards including the Goldwin Sans Medal at Cornell, Dean’s List, Scholarship by the Polytechnic University of Catalunya (UPC). Miriam has been an architecture guest critic at MIT, BAC, Cornell and Harvard University.
Inhabitable Infrastructure - New York, NY - Fall 2011 - Harvard GSD Professors: Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss The Guenther’s Bridge Towers have a grand history of failed utopias: they embody a series of social and technological aspirations that were not able to be fully completed. This project intervenes at the site at three different scales: through connecting the four existing towers at the top and creating a new horizontal icon for the island of Manhattan, through developping a second skin that provides more space for the units to be reconfigured and which is able to filtrate the air, grow vegetation and collect water, and through creating a structure at the bottom that embraces and potentiates the life of the neighborhood. This project acts on the specificities of the context but also aims at providing a strategy that could be replicated for the renovation and revitalization of cladded housing buildings from the 60’s and 70’s that are many now reaching a state of disrepair.
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Function of Time - Stockholm - Spring 2012 - Harvard GSD Professor: Farshid Moussavi The White Box paradigm refers to a space that is untouched by time and by the vicissitudes of the outside world. As Brian O’Doherty points out, “this specially segregated space is a kind of non-space, ultra-space, or ideal space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled.” This project, however, explores the notion of the museum as an institution that will embrace the evolution and change of art as of in response to social, political and economical forces. Through variation of one same structural system, the vault, and changes on the lighting strategy, this mat building accomodates virtually infinite spatial affects. Like the Musaeum or Mouseion at Alexandria - a place that would bring together some of the best scholars of the Hellenistic world - this museum is also the home of music and poetry, a philosophical school and library.
Bundles Field City - Ethiopia - Fall 2012 - Harvard GSD Professor: Toshiko Mori The Bundles Field City project challenges the program of the market in developing areas at two different scales. The first is at the scale of an architectural object and urban signifier. The second is at the scale of the local economies through the insertion of the cultivation of bamboo, its processing, transportation, trading businesses and the development of craftsmanship. As an architectural object and urban signifier, the project attempts to create a space for the community, a kind of forum, where exchanges of goods mix in with the life of a community, their meetings, festivities, and celebrations. The inherent flexibility of the activities defines the openness and simplicity of the architecture. A light structure of vaulting bundles of bamboo is the sole definer of the space. The scale of the implied volumes and the thinness of the members create a certain light monumentality.
Venice Biennale: Cronocaos - 2010 - Venice, Italy- AMO Team: Ippolito Laparelli, Kayoko Ota, Carolina Cantante, Farshid Gazor, Andrew Linn, Amelia McPhee, Miriam Roure Parera, Simon Pennec, Stephan Petermann, Becky Quintal, Sasha Smolin, Lawrence Siu, James Westcott 2010 is the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorised implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of ‘preservation’ to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the – corresponding? – global rage to eliminate the evidence of the postwar period of architecture as a social project. The exhibition focuses on 26 projects as a body of work concerned with time and history. In room one, the documentary debris of these efforts is displayed. Room two is dedicated to the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of a linear evolution of time. Together, the rooms document our period of acute CRONOCAOS.
Prada Runway - Milan, Italy - Woman SS 2010 - AMO Team: Ippolito Laparelli, Miriam Roure Parera, Fausto Fantinuoli, Andreas Kofler A concrete warehouse in Milan is transformed each season to accommodate Prada runway shows. For SS Woman collection of 2012, the audience is divided along two sides of an abstract wall, which is pierced with seven doors. Models appear and disappear through the openings. Collection, set design, projections and music are choreographed from glamorous XIX Century palaces, to motel corridors and beach, trashy images or illusions. Neon lights, ornamented door frames, palm trees in the middle of neoclassic palace halls, and multiplied doors leading to banal interiors invade the space with color.
Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi - 2010 - Venice, Italy - OMA Team: Ippolito Laparelli, Andreas Kofler, Augustin Perez-Torres, Miriam Roure Parera, Carlos Pena First constructed in 1228, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was a trading post for German merchants before becoming a customs house under Napoleon in 1806. The Fondaco - at 11,000m2 one of Venice’s largest buildings - now stands as a muted icon of the Venetian mercantile era. OMA’s renovation scheme - composed both of architecture and public programming - continues the Fondaco dei Tedeschi’s tradition of vitality and adaptation. Venice will acquire a landmark that will become a shared civic facility and a crucial element in the cultural fabric of the city.
Casablanca Theater - 2010 - Casablanca, Morrocco Team: Miriam Roure Parera, Nathan Friedman 2010 is the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorised implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of ‘preservation’ to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the – corresponding? – global rage to eliminate the evidence of the postwar period of architecture as a social project. The exhibition focuses on 26 projects as a body of work concerned with time and history. In room one, the documentary debris of these efforts is displayed. Room two is dedicated to the wrenching simultaneity of preservation and destruction that is destroying any sense of a linear evolution of time. Together, the rooms document our period of acute CRONOCAOS.
Carboard Lights - 2007 - Cornell Universiy Professor: Martha Bohn Team: Nathan Friedman, Miriam Roure Parera Departing from the most basic shape for a point light, the cone, this series of Cardboard Lights explore subtle variations that challenged the way in which the luminaire sits, stands or hangs. Using computer-aided deformation functions, the shapes simulate natural processes of rippling, bulging, or warping. The use laser-cut corrugated cardboard exemplifies a low-tech high-tech combination, which speaks to ease of fabrication, economic performance, and affect maximization. Simplicity and subtlety are their main qualities.