SOFĂ?A LENS Architecture Portfolio ETSAM Madrid 2017
CV Curriculum Vitae Proffesional & Academic
01. Final Thesis Project ‘PFC’ ETSAM Spring 2017
02. Design Studio Projects ETSAM 2008 - 2015
03. Professional Projects 2011 - present
Sofía Lens Bell born March 30, 1990 Vigo, Spain M. Arch. 2017 ETSAM UPM Universidad Politécnica de Madrid sofialens@gmail.com +34 633176033 c/ Martín de los Heros 40, 3ºB 280015 Madrid
CV. Professional & Education
I.T. skills
2008-2015 Student of Architecture at ETSAM School of Architecture, UPM Technical University of Madrid and Università degli Studi Roma TRE.
Advanced IT skills: AutoCAD, Adobe Indesign, Adobe Photoshop, Rhinoceros Basic IT skills: VRAY rendering / Grasshopper, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere
2012-2013 Assistant researcher in Cultural Landscape Research Group (GIPC) in the Technical University of Madrid, under the direction of Juan Miguel Hernández León and Rodrigo de la O García. References: Rodrigo de la O García // rodrigodelao@hotmail.es 2013-2014 Layout designer and editor of the yearly magazine “Displacements Journal” (displacementsjournal.com), under the direction of Lucía Jalón. References: Lucía Jalón // jalonoyarzun@gmail.com 2014-2017 Main Editor and Community Manager of BMIAA (BigMat International Architecture Agenda), under the direction of Jesús Aparicio Guisado and Jesús Donaire. References: Jesús Donaire // jesus.donaire@jesusdonaire.com 2016 Assistant architect at 山本理顕 Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop for 7 months, architecture office in Yokohama, Japan. Collaboration on international project development The Circle at Zurich Airport and National Japanese Competition Kashiwazaki Town Hall. Advanced model making and sketches for competition entry. References: Taiga KASAI // kasai@riken-yamamoto.com 2015-2017 Honours in PFC Master’s Degree Thesis Project Project Tutor: Ángel Borrego Design Studio: Juan Herreros
Language skills Spanish: Native English: Native Italian: B2 Basic communication skills in French and Portuguese.
Publications “Transmutaciones. Ud.23. Enunciado 2012-2013. El Joker” Works carried out under Federico Soriano Design Studio Unit. Part of “Fisuras Magazine” series. ISBN: 978-84-940502-0-6 “GRAMMATICALS” Selection of students’ works carried out under Federico Soriano Design Studio Unit. ISBN: 978-84-942926-0-6
Public Grant Programmes Excellence Grant for profficient undergraduate students in the Madrid Region 2008-2009. Erasmus Grant for the mobility of undergraduate students within EU, 2010 in Roma TRE. Internship Collaboration Grant by the Spanish Ministry of Education, 2013. FARO Grant for the international placement of Spanish undergraduate students abroad, 2016. Carried out during 7 months in Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop in Yokohama, Japan.
C inemas in Madrid an ar chi ve for ar chitectur e and film
The first section of the Thesis Project creates an archival body of work composed of elements within the already existing municipal, regional and State archives. These original plans, drawings and documents regarding the planning and construction of the movie theaters in Madrid during the XXth Century are bound together with a vast recollection of films, recordings and literary elements related to cinema. The creation of this heterogeneous network of knowledge and memory becomes an opportunity to propose new access to otherwise bureaucratically unreachable public content while contributing to a public debate on architectural preservation beyond the actual physical reconstruction of existing buildings. The second section proposes eight possible turnouts for a reinterpretation, re-use or re-appropriation -be it either a literal, physical appropriation, or an abstract, postmodern imitation game- of the Madrid cinema typology. The designs draw from the newly-composed cinema and film architectural archive to create contemporary public space within private buildings and businesses, paying close attention to the social, legal and programmatic issues of each case study.
01. Final Thesis Project ‘PFC’ ETSAM Spring 2017
IN D EX 1. C o nte xt Atl as: h i storic al anal y sis f i l mog raphic anal y sis urban anal y sis t y pol og ic al anal y sis 2 . Ar c hive : g eneral c onc e pt pr oj ec t outl ine 3 . De sign pr o j e c t: e a r l y pic tur e houses n e i g h bourhood c inemas G ran Vía r e v i val c inemas a d ul t- f il m theaters s m al l - sc r een c inemas mul tipl ex
02. Design Studio Projects ETSAM 2008 - 2015
INDEX Design Studio 9 Copy? Right! with Juan Herreros & Michael Stanton Design Studio 7 Instant Wedding Chapel with Federico Soriano 2013 Europan 13 Territories of Knowledge in Hammaro, Sweden
DS 09 ‘R esi d e n t i a l Pa r k i n g s ’ b y A r c h i z o o m A s s o c i a t i
Early design collages explore the possibility of spatial appropriation within the existing structural grid.
Programmatic diagrams showing possible interference in scheduling, technical elements and lighting in order to organize spaces.
O M A / A M O ’s c o n c e p t d i a g r a m f o r t h e Yo ko h a m a I n t e r n a t i o n a l Po r t Pa s s e n g e r Te r m i n a l M a s t e r p l a n 1 9 9 6
copy? right! p h o t og r a p h c o l l a g e b y D a v id Hockney
Film stills were used in collages as a representation of continuity and segmentation in cinema.
The project brief asked for the creation of a housing and leisure complex on the grounds of what is currently the State Official Car Parking in Madrid. Students were encouraged to work within the existing building’s reticular structure and most importantly, to create a personal design strategy based on a film of the student’s choice. My strategy proposal lies on the filming concepts of continuity and segmentation, unfolding a topographic field of potential activities within the existing building, as a sort of cartography of architectural anticipation. The resulting architecture is just a transliteration of such cartography into specific design elements.
‘ N o - s t o p C i t y R e s i d e n c t i a l Parking s’ b y A r c h i z o o m A s s o c i a t i s how a s a t y r i c a l ye t p o s s i bl e a p p r oach to structure appropriation
DS 09
copy? right!
DS 09
copy? right!
DS 09 Students were asked to draw a Cartography of a Party, taking note of activities, spatial use, geometry, topography, topological situations, dynamics and social routines, etc.
The team decided on hosting an actual party and using a disposable paper carpet flooring as a relic of sorts from which to interpret and draw conclusions.
party cartographies This was done through a comprehensive recollection of all physical remains in the carpet, as well as through an analytical approach, displaying all movements as captured by a stop-motion camera in an abstract grid.
DS 09
party cartographies
DS 09
party cartographies
DS 07
instant wedding chapel The Design Studio brief asked for a indepth research process that would lead to the design of a 16 square meter instant wedding chapel in Eurovegas, Madrid. My project took old-people’s homes as a potential workforce for Casino businesses. My research proved that the whole of activities and jobs comprised within the Instant Wedding Chapel were achievable by retired people as a counter-activity to fight gambling addictions amongst the elderly. Further diagrams explored the spatial necessities and possibilities of a space for such activities.
DS 07
instant wedding chapel
DS 07
instant wedding chapel
2013 EUROPAN 13 Territories of Knowledge EUROPAN 13 Territories of Knowledge is a large-scale territorial-approach project in the municipality of Hämmaro, in Sweden. The EUROPAN brief asked for the actualization of former industrial areas in the outskirts of the actual town of Hämmaro, in order to create a new productive hub and working placements for the inhabitants of the small town. Instead, our proposal reflected on in the inherent value of the dispersion of such rural areas and created a visual and nature-oriented hitch-hiking path connecting the two areas -the existing town and the now-abandoned industrial areas. Our focous was to propose a form of landscape inhabitation that would lead to a long-term occupation of the industrial area. Special attention was paid to research of the natural environment in Hämmaro and the low-key culture of the rural communities in Sweden.
PROJECT TEAM COLLEAGUES Lucía Jalón / Berta Risueño / Víctor Cano
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TERRITORIES OF KNOWLEDGE
territories of knowledge how does knowledge become situated and embodied? how does it come to be shared by a community, organize territories and flow through networks? european territories of knowledge cognitariat & the slowness of experience Knowledge economy, economy of the affects or the broader term of biopolitics. All these different labels look in the same direction, they try to name and understand the radical changes linked to new ways of production and their relation to everyday life that are deeply transforming our society since the last half of the twentieth century. Independent of the label we choose to term the situation, one thing is clear: every single act of our lives has become a productive one, when we upload a video to YouTube or we update our Facebook profile, when we take care of our family or play our favorite tune we are contributing to keep the system in motion. The true change lies therefore not in the name we choose to describe the new model but in accepting that at the heart of it appears the production of a new kind of common –shared languages, affects, ideas, spatialities–. It cannot be denied that several risks appear with this transformation, from the financial objectivation of the common to the extreme control of its dynamics by a powerful system that looks over it -it all has an impact in the lives of its citizens. But we cannot stop at that. Along with these risks, opportunities arise: the strength and power of the individuals and their shared communities becomes bigger and their ability to create and invent new realities radically increases. It is precisely this aspect we need and want to work on.
Cognitariat is the term proposed by Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, Bifo, to define a new working class which emerges in a world where social labor has become the “endless recombination of a myriad of fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds”. In this situation the sphere of affects and cognition is stressed to its limits, overwhelmed
by non-stop attention-demanding conditions and endless informational noise, the mind and the body -key elements in the production of the common- break down as they reach their organic limits. This colonization of time and its intensive acceleration also leads to an impoverishment of experience, and consequentially, of the resources that feed and recreate the common. While sensibility is activated in time, sensuality is slow, Bifo tell us. Therefore while new technologies and contemporary social dynamics increase intensity and speed of messages and exchanges, they leave behind the importance of that sensory dimension that balances and enriches experience and thus, knowledge. By focusing on that idea -that sensuality is slowwe offer a set of instruments, both practical and conceptual, to help us work towards a balance that shall result in a society better prepared for the challenges lying ahead while integrating escological, social and psychological sustainability.
The first of these instruments is territory, both as an idea and as the material ground of lived experience. It is the territory’s materiality what becomes the main tool to recover the slowness of the senses: distances, obstacles, everyday events, affects, relations… they all need to come to foreward once again. Needless to say this is not a call for a return to the past and the burying of the digital era, but the necessary claim of its equally important role in the experience of the real. The territory becomes once again a common resource as the forests of Europe once where, bringing back together the production of wood or oxygen with a more –at least at first sight- ethereal though not less important product: the energy and liveliness of the real as ground for broader knowledge.
grounded networks & new territories of knowledge
The map above shows the network created by the universities existing in Europe before the year 1400. At that time the university and the existing urban and social fabric intertwined in different depths and dimension. The built space, the individuals and the understanding of the world they shared came together in a complex assemblage that broaden its scope through the role of journeys and correspondence. Though there were few universities, that complex urban and territorial condition helped create a shared territory of knowledge of european scope. Today, though there are countless universities in the European Union there is no sense of a european territory of knowledge. Universities and other Higher Education institutions act as isolated nodes in a dematerialized network in which knowledge flows too high above the ground losing the chance of transfer, unexpected communication, unwanted contagion… All these, situations which have always defined the development and advancement of science and knowledge.
A new territorial model needs to be thought and implemented and though we cannot go back to the year 1400 we can take some lessons from it. The unbounded condition of the knowledge structure. While today we are trapped in the problems of institutional access it was then a matter of entry into a community of knowledge which shared dynamics, resources and the everyday with the rest of the city or land in which it was sited. Thus the university was not contained by the walls of a building but spread in a diffuse way creating a complex landscape of possibilities. It was precisely this intermingling between citizens and collegiates and the movement and communication throughout the continent, onto other universities or growing cities, that helped bring the emerging knowledge network to the ground. A grounding that would lead to one of the periods of most richness and social advancement in centuries.
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The extent and materiality of the territory appears then as an instrument able to produce a special kind of slowness but also as the source of a form of experience that, linking with a longrunning family of philosophers and scientists from Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, Henry Thoreau or John Dewey, invites us to return to the everyday, to that which is front of us, as the
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most powerful trigger in the search for a deeper knowledge and understanding of the world. Inspired by this same spirit the astronomer Tycho Brahe founded in 1576 the community of Uraniborg. 381 kilometers away from Hammarö in the Isle of Hven in Oresund Tycho Brahe turned the island into one of the first scientific communities of modern Europe and a peculiar one since he understood the island as a model, a tool in itself to understand the universe and its laws. Thus, the two observatories, one above ground the other underground, the gardens, the forest, the lakes, etc., all were positioned and built following the ordered laws of Tycho’s understanding of the world: a geometrically pure
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How does knowledge become situated and embodied? How does it come to be shared by a community, organize territories and flow through networks? Lieux de Savoir, Christian Jacob
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universe of order, spheres and symmetries. Though its duration was short after the death of the king and patron Frederick II, the extent of the works undertaken there spread quickly throughout the continent, Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova being one of the most significant ones. Today, almost five hundred years later, science is different, we have come face to face with uncertainty and thermodynamics, unrepresentable geometries and multidimensional universes, so we could come to ask, how would the territory-model for this new understanding of the world be?
a territory of knowledge embodying today’s model of the universe?
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utopia reinvented: what is a neighbourhood? For too long now the discourses on utopia have been overshadowed with the idea of future and projection. The modern era brought reason to the fore, along with the scientific will of people like Tycho Brahe, came an unbound desire to “establish science as the foundation of morals, to turn politics into a branch of physics and, ultimately, to enjoin the replacement of arbitrary government by the rule of rational administration” (Rowe and Koetter, 1978). Thus, slowly but steadily utopia became a program for the future, a checklist to fulfill in the hands of the new and powerful social engineers who would ‘replace the government of man by the administration of things’. But if we look to the origin of the word, both etymologically and culturally, we might find new paths and tools for its reinvention. The word Utopia, first used in 1516 by Thomas More in the work of the same name, means literally nonplace, the negation of a place. That’s why Fredric Jameson, discussing More’s book writes on the necessary and absolute exteriority of the Island -and in consequence of the concept- in order for
it to become the analytical tool it was intended to be. Its power for influence and critique lies within that negation, that exteriority. But what if, as does Louis Marin in his work Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces, we take the analysis of that negation, of the NON-place, further? It is not the same to say ‘the soul is mortal’, ‘the soul in immortal’ or ‘the soul is non-mortal’. That negation becomes much more than a negation as it opens up the possibility of a vacuum charged with tensions and potentiality. It is towards it that this proposal wants to look. A kind of blank -a perfect and absolute blanklike that described in Lewis Caroll’s The Hunting of the Snark that is completely present because its capacity to activate social desire and reflection does not pull us from the future, from a projected state but disquiets and provokes us from the present. That is why any project willing to reinvent utopia will need to offer us the tools to be understood in the present becoming a nonplace able to call our ideas and conceptions into question.
LEFT, FROM THE MAP OF HVEN, THE WORLD’S FIRST MAP BASED ON TRIANGULAR SURVEY, IN A 1596 WOODCUT ATTRIBUTED TO WILLEM JANSZOON BLAEU. ABOVE, TYCHO BRAHE’S TRIANGULATION OF ORESUND AS RECONSTRUCTED IN HAASBROEK 1968. TOP RIGHT, LOUIS MARIN DIAGRAMS OF THOMAS MORE’S UTOPIA AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S DIAGRAMS ON THE STATE OF EXCEPTION. BOTTOM RIGHT, REPRESENTATION OF A NEBULAE.
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sites and legends: storytelling as participation How to project a grounded knowledge territory? How to involve present and future citizens in the discussion about a new neighbourscape? How can the tools of description and representation contribute to the conception, development and sharing of this kind of spatiality? We follow Sallie Marston in defining the site as an “immanent (self-organizing) event-space dynamically composed of bodies, doings and sayings. Sites are differentiated and differentiating, unfolding singularities that are not only dynamic, but also ‘hang together’ through the congealments and blockages of force relations. The ‘actuality’ of any site is always poised for compositional variation -subject to reorganizations and desorganizations- as its inexhaustible ‘virtuality’ or potential continually rearticulates itself”. The island of Hven and the castle of Uraniborg were drawn by Tycho Brahe himself, but it is the legend written to accompany those documents
that has the true power to involve the imagination of the reader. It is this concept -legend as storytelling- that we propose as core instrument in the participatory and discussion processes that should accompany any transformation in the built environment as the one proposed here.
HVEN ISLAND
A. Principal building, constructed in the very middle of the whole lay-out, the four sides making a perfect square, most exactly turned to the 4 directions of the world, so that the two towers look to the south and north, and the 2 doors to the east and west. E. Eastern gate of rustic and Tuscan design. D. Western gate decorated with the same Kind of work. Beyond these two gates are Kennels which house 2 large English watchdogs that announce visitors from
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all sides with their barking. B. Printing shop, copying the plan of the larger building on a small scale. C. Small house for servants; it also resembles the larger building in front, and has an underground prison. F. Exterior view of the wall. G. Interior view of the wall with its flat top where 2 can walk abreast. N. Four paths towards the gates and the small building and running exactly through the 4 directions of the world. O. Four wooden gates. M. Arbor constructed in the garden for pleasantry. L. Gardens of plants and flowers. H. Gardens of 300 trees of various Kinds. I. Gambling table called Pilkentafel. K. Gambling table for globules called Rolltafel.
URANIBORG EXPLANATION OF THE GROUND PLAN
A. Eastern entrance. C. Western entrance. Four halls meeting at right angles. B. Fountain turning a waterwheel which throws out water in different directions. D. Winter dining-room. E, F, G. Guest chambers. L. Main stairs by which one ascends to the upper floor. H. Kitchen. I. Pantry. K. Well, 40 ells (fathoms) deep, serving the hydraulic contrivance, and distributing water to every
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room of the whole building by means of pipes. M. Space for storing Kindling. O. Steps to the underground pantry. S. Space above laboratory, where coals are thrown into the furnaces. P. Smaller stairs leading from the laboratory to the observatory. R. Aviary towards the west. Q. Another aviary in the east in which the birds sing while flying to and from among small trees. T. Library. VV. The large brazen globe. 4. Flues. V. Tables. Y. Couches. N. Secret places.
URANIBORG EXPLANATION OF THE EXTERIOR OF THE MAIN BUILDING
A. East door composed of Ionic and Doric work. B. Winter dining- room. F. Foundation stone which was laid by the French ambassador, the eminent Lord Charles Danzaeus. G and H. Windows of the underground rooms. C. Guest chamber, towards the west are 2 like this one. M. Round museum, with the library and the large bronze globe whose diameter is 6 feet. K. Aviary, corresponding to the one on the west side. L. Circular underground chemical laboratory, containing 16 different furnaces, for the
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Paracelsian art (medicine) I. Aperture through which live coals are discharged for studies in pyronomics (chemistry). Z. Cell for storing wood for winter use. X. Kitchen. D. The King´s red room. a. Octagonal yellow room. E. The Queen´s blue room. On the west side, corresponding to these last three, is the great summer dining-room, decorated in green, from which all ships, from both the eastern and the western sea, plying to and fro through the Sound, can be seen in a pleasant view. X. Windows of the upper floor. O. The great south observatory, containing 6 huge astronomical instruments. P. Revolving globe upon which instruments are placed when the distances of the stars are being observed. A like room corresponds to this on the west. Q. Octagonal room in which is situated the above mentioned globe. N. The lesser south observatory, containing large equatorial armillaria. W. Stairs leading down to the laboratory and up to the observatory. R. Main north observatory, containing 4 astronomical instruments. S. Smaller north observatory, containing other large equatorial armillaria. T. Another revolving globe used for
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mounting instruments; a similar globe is located on the east side. V. The place where the great globe itself is situated. e. The upper octagonal chamber, just below the highest point of the building from which the view is open on all sides, and which has round the roof a parade called Gallery. yy Octagonal structure in which there are 4 carved statues, representing the seasons of the year; by a hydraulic contrivance they are turned about at will, and each one lifts up three waters jets. Six flues ending in one towards the south, and 6 others towards the north, in which all flues of the whole building individually unite. N. Place for the clock which sounds the hours by means of a bell that hangs above in S. h.The Pegasus, showing whence the wind blows; when it is turned about it shows, by means of a movable indicator under the ceiling of the main octagonal chamber, all the winds just as they blow every day, and at any hour they are manifested under the same ceiling by means of another indicator revolving on the same center. (Presumably one indicator showed the direction and the other the velocity of the wind.)
Louis Marin diagrams of More’s Utopia, made to convey the complex spatial play of the open while closed condition of the island, share a strange familiarity with Giorgio Agamben’s diagrams to explain the state of exception. With them the Italian philosopher seeks to explain precisely the impossibility of that absolute exteriority Jameson talked about, everything has come together in a strange and complex topological figure in which outside and inside intermingle. That impossibility of an outside brings down one of the main binary categories that have conditioned architecture and urbanism for centuries, the distinction of public-private. This classification and all its variations –as the distinction between the house and the workplace- allowed us to comfortably project and interpret the built environment, the fabric of our cities, the spatiality of our everyday. But this does not work any longer, in the new economy the simple act of tweeting becomes productive and unclassifiable within the public-private realm. Thus, how could we think the idea of a neighbourhood today? Should it be through a extremely measured strategy to distribute public and private spaces with their corresponding thresholds? Or should we try an understand what
could lie behind the idea of a neighbourscape? A complex landscape where different levels of intimacy and commonality intermingle with broad and attuned relations to the ecosystem; where time is not scientific ruler of phases but open collaborator in duration; where the uses, doings and sayings of the community overthrow any possible programmatic decision…? Geometry as used by Tycho Brahe in his triangulation of the island of Hven to produce the plan that accompanies this text will not work any longer, at least not on its own, to project, built and tell this new kind of spatiality. Without forgetting those tools we need to incorporate new ones that can explain and help us to work and understand the new dimensions of the real.
we won’t build observatories as buildings anymore but dispositions capable of activating the territory to perform as such
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TERRITORIES OF KNOWLEDGE
“Every day during a year, at different times, a man goes into a forest and looks for the rock he had chosen in his first incursion: flat enough to sit comfortably on it, with his back straight and his legs crossed in a Buddhist attitude of meditation. The rock overlooks a small irregular space in the forest ground, a one-meter-radius imaginary circle, about the size of a dining table. There is nothing unusual in that precise location. The reason for choosing it is that it is at the foot of the rock, and that the man sitting on it can comfortably watch it closely, sometimes kneeling or even lying down on the ground to see more details. He carries a pocket magnifyng glass, a notebook and a pencil. He tries to stay as still as possible and not to alter with his footsteps or his hands that portion of the forest he calls “the mandala,” using a term of the Tibetan Buddhist culture. A mandala is a circle of sand in which the universe is symbolically contained. Carefully trained monks shape it using different-colour sand to map abstract designs that converge towards the center and usually suggest a marked revolving rythm. The work is complicated and can take several days. Upon completion, the monks take it apart, almost with the same meticulous reverence with which it was completed, in order to remember the impermanence of everything, the perpetual making and unmaking of life and nature. But David Haskell, the man who goes into the forest every day to examine a minimum parcel of its extent is not a monk nor a mystic, but a biology professor at a university in Tennessee. His project is simultaneously spiritual, literary, scientific. He wants to continue the tradition of contemplative retreat in nature, inspired by Taoist and Buddhist meditators and also by the American example of Thoreau. He wants to apply the empirical observation method while remaining in a very limited experimental field: what is organic life in the ground of a forest like, the visible and invisible texture that involves insects, tree leaves, birds, worms, lichens, squirrels, the sunlight that starts off the secret mechanism of photosynthesis on each tree leaf, wind, rain, snow. And he wants to tell everything he sees, and explain it under the light of everything he knows, and also leave evidence of its blank spaces and uncertainties, and of the emotional effect that the habit of going to the forest every day has on him. We are so used to labels and twofold disjunctives that there is almost no way to find a suitable spot on the bookshelf for The Forest Unseen, the work David Haskell has been writing during his year in the forest. It is a diary and a popular science book. It is a literary narrative and the notebook of an experiment. It is a sort of spiritual guide with no trace of mystical vagueness and a sort of practical guide to take on field to look at each and every one of the things that one does not usually see, nor hear, nor imagine that exist - not because they belong to these deceivingly fertile and dark kingdoms of fantasy but because they are right here in front of our eyes, accessible to our ears should we pay a little attention, literally beating beneath the ground we tread on. William Blake loathed scientific rationalism as much as the factory smoke that darkened and poisoned the air at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but his poetic imagination enabled him to intuit science’s very nature: you can see a world in every grain of sand and cover infinity in the palm of your hand. In his modest Amherst garden in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson looked at the kingdoms of nature with a no less acute perception than Charles Darwin did on his five year journey through the oceans, mountain ranges and islands from almost the whole Earth. In Zen meditation one looks unblinking at a blank wall. Sitting on his rock, with no more observation instrumental that his own eyes, his alert ears, his magnifying glass, his notebook, his pen, David George Haskell pays attention to the passing of the hours and the seasons. The circle of the year corresponds to that of the observed space, and each day the distinction between the researching consciousness and its study field fades more, the difference between the still and alert figure and the forest and its creatures. A bird or a raccoon approaches and stares at him, and then the animal is the observer and the scientist the creature subjected to scrutiny. With the humid spring heat the air gets filled with insects. A female mosquito lands on his forearm and Haskell sees it, enlarged through the magnifying glass, while it drills his skin and sucks his blood and its abdomen swells with it”.
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it could happen like this, but also in some other way. it is only the beginning. As we turn our backs to the idea of utopia as program, as a cultural version of social engineering, we must admit that we need to talk about possible nieghbourscapes, there won’t be only one, there are endless possibilities. One of them is here proposed. A landscape of events based on the close relation between Hammarö and water, through the lake shore, the inner lake, the flood zones, water entry points, snow, … The water will act as the experiential and sensory element that slows and organizes the new TERRITORY OF KNOWLEDGE proposed. Different elements are put into play, each of them is charged with a singular field of possibilities that, when entering into contact with others, will reconfigure and modeling the development of the project. Because of this in this board only a hypothetical moment can be conveyed because the next moment it all has changed again. Each element leaves behind its objectual condition to become AN EMBODIED EVENT. A building is an event capable of reconfiguring the existing force balance while producing a new state. It is from these premises that favor an understanding of the project as a FORM-ACTION, a spatial product focused not on the geometrical definition of an object’s shape but in the design of the DISPOSITION of the different parts of the field, be those material or immaterial. As explained by Keller Easterling, “the designer of active forms is designing not the field in its entirety but rather the delta or the means by which the field changes -not only the shape or contour of the game piece but also a repertoire for how it plays.” For this reason, in the definition of an the use of a LEGEND, like that of Tycho Brahe, becomes essential. A narration capable of bringing into the design process not only the initiated member but also those participating from the outside. Consequently this documentation is understood more as a tool for discussion, reflection and inclusion —as utopia should be—, than as the representation of a projected and determinate state of things.
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HE#03 N EW H OUSING C LUSTER E VENT : ITINERANTS
A legend for an EVENTSCAPE INTIMACY |||||||||||| COMMONALITY A new way to approach the public-private traditional division between the living space and the working and social space. All spheres of life intermingle creating a complex landscape of relationships and unclassifiable areas that require a gradient of intensities between the intimate and the common crossing through the different situations, the built environment and the sphere of communication.
SPHERES OF THE INTIMATE HE#01 & HE#02 H OUSING U NIT E VENT E XISTING H OUSING C LUSTER E VENT Usually the existing housing units involve the presence of three or more individuals, all of them potential members of the COMMUNITY OF KNOWLEDGE. Each housing unit is usually composed of different built spaces: house, garage, workshop, barn, shed, etc. The level of communication of the HOUSING UNIT is low both in the direct and virtual spheres, in the first case due to the distance between HOUSING UNITS of Hammarö and the second due to the fact that it depends on the commercial internet connections available. The EXISTING HOUSING CLUSTER are the union of a series of four up to ten HOUSING UNITS usually linked by a common path of arrival.
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BUILDING PHASES
SPHERES OF THE COMMON
Different N EW H OUSING C LUSTERS are proposed and specified in the moment described as being developed in different building phases signaled through a change of colour in their symbol. Only if the fabric of the proposed territory densifies and requires its growing should this phases be implemented. Without them the system would reconfigure accordingly.
A series of different spheres of the common are proposed, linked in some cases mainly to education, in others to research, practical and theoretical, and others in which these two activities come together. The different spaces are classified and positioned on the territory depending on their size. Allowing for close smaller centres and bigger clusters that can attract an increased activity and level of difference within its exchanges
COMMUNICATION There are two types of N EW H OUSING C LUSTERS . One intended for ITINERANT visitors, students, professors, researchers, guests... with a denser distribution of housing and a specific disposition between the units depending of the duration of the intended stay which determines also the rest of linked services (cafeteria, laundry, workr and commonrooms, sports facilities,...). The second type of N EW H OUSING C LUSTERS is thought for LONG-STAYERS, understood for new inhabitants of Hammarö’s COMMUNITY OF KNOWLEDGE. Specifically thought for young families wishing to return to Hammarö and linked to the working positions produced through the territory and the link to the K ARLSTAD U NIVERSITY H UB . Their more permanent condition is reflected in a lower density and predominant role of open spaces and relations to common small spaces (sauna, barns, workshops, greenhouses...).
N EW
HE#04 H OUSING C LUSTER E VENT : LONG - STAYERS
1000
2000
KE#05 & KE#06 K NOWLEDGE EVENT: W ORKSHOP & F ABRICATION L ABS R ESEARCH & L ABS
EXPERIENCE WATER
A different kind of KNOWLEDGE EVENTS are linked to the idea of research, both through LABS, WORKSHOPS and FABRICATION LABS that can offer specific working conditions, tools and resources. The centers are classified according to their access level, number of disciplines and agents affected and range of its production.
O NE P OSSIBLE B EGINNING WE#07 WATER EVENTS: LAKE & OTHER WATER SURFACES FLOODZONE
KE#05 K NOWLEDGE EVENT: S CHOOL / PRIMARY / ADULTS
KINDERGARTEN
Each embodied event of the proposed landscape can be positioned on a communications gradient informing of the intensity and type of link produced: - INLAND. It refers to the intensity of its connections and possibilities of exchange within the community of knowledge, be that material or immaterial. It will depend on the closeness to other nodes, the intensity and activities on those, the number of individuals involved, etc. - DIRECT. It refers to the direct physical connection with others, ranging from a low level on the isolated housing units to a high level in the proposed KARLSTAD UNIVERSITY HUB in the Lake. Its intensity increases with the level of difference existing within the connections. - VIRTUAL. It describes the intensity of the connection to the digital world, ranging from a simple commercial internet connection as those available for the HOUSING UNITS to the high level connection with different conditions of access to international databases and resources available from the different COMMUNITY OF
KNOWLEDGE EVENTS (CKE)
A forest in a book, Antonio Muñoz Molina
WKE#08 WATER EVENT: EXPERIENCE ZONE KE#06 K NOWLEDGE EVENT: H IGH S CHOOL P ROFESSIONAL T RAINING
LINKS & TRACKS There is a conscious intent at leaving the existing roads untoached and no fast road or fast connection is proposed in order to understand the importance of distances and material congealments. As an example the proposed K NOWLEDGE C OMMUNITY L INKS are always translated into a more complex path in its material constitution.
S ECOND L EVEL R OAD KE#07 K NOWLEDGE EVENT: K ARLSTAD U NIVERSITY H UB
T HIRD L EVEL R OAD
VIRTUAL
EVENTSCAPE
K NOWLEDGE C OMMUNITY L INK INLAND KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY DIRECT
3000
he wants to tell everything he sees, and explain it under the light of everything he knows, and also leave evidence of its blank spaces and uncertainties, and of the emotional effect that the habit of going to the forest every day has on him.
They form kinds of nebulae, where the new and existing buildings, environment and programmed events intertwine creating congealments, spheres of slowness, synergies, differences, havens, park areas, promenades, etc. All of them are enclosed by a line, sometimes materialized sometimes just marked in the ground intended to act as the tree trunk in which to slow things down. In the third and final board the main experience zone in the lake is described with more detail.
03. Professional Projects 2011 - present
IN D EX 2 0 11 - 2 0 13 Assistan t Resear ch er C ul t ur a l L a n dsc ape Re se ar c h Gr o up U n ive r s i d a d Po litĂŠcn ica de M adr id 2 0 14 - pr e se nt. Edito r-in -ch ief Bi g M a t In t e r n a tio nal Ar c hite c tur e Age nda h t t p : //www. b m iaa. co m 2 0 12 - 2 0 14 Edito r & L ayo ut D esig n D i s pl a c em e nts Jo ur nal , vo l . 1 h t t p : / / d i sp lacem en tsjo ur n al. co m 2 0 15 Assistan t Ar ch itect R i ke n Ya m am o to & Fie l d S ho p i n Yo ko h am a, Jap an
2011 - 2013 A ss is t ant Res earcher C ul t ural Lan d scap e Research Gro u p U ni ve rsid ad Po litécn ica d e Mad rid
Assistant researcher in Cultural Landscape Research Group (GIPC) in the Technical University of Madrid, under the direction of Juan Miguel Hernández León and Rodrigo de la O García. Teamwork for the preparation of the exhibition “Cultural Landscapes of Energy Resources”, which took place from May-June 2013. Exhibition partners were Fundación Endesa and FECYT. References: Rodrigo de la O García (rodrigodelao@hotmail.es)
2012 - 2014 Editor & L ay out D es ign D i spl acem en ts Jo u rn al, vo l.1 ht t p: / / www.d isp lacem en tsjo u rn al.co m
displacements: an x’scape journal is an architectural & editorial project born out of the research and teaching led since 2009 from the Landscape LAB at the Master in Advanced Architectural Projects. It aims to face in an integrated, transdisciplinary and situated way the two essential aspects of any critical practice: knowledge and action. References: Lucía Jalón Oyarzun (jalonoyarzun@gmail.com)
Feb - June 2016 A ssis t ant Archit ect Ri ke n Yam am o to & F ield Sh o p Yo ko h am a, Jap an
7-month Assistant architect at Riken Yamamoto & Field Shop, architecture office in Yokohama, Japan. Collaboration on international project development The Circle at Zurich Airport and National Japanese Competition Kashiwazaki Town Hall. Advanced construction model design and sketches for competition entry. References: Taiga KASAI (kasai@riken-yamamoto.co)
2014 - present Edit or-in-chief Bi gMat Int e rnatio n al Arch itectu re Ag en d a ht t p ://w w w .b m iaa.co m
Main Contents Editor and Community Manager of BMIAA, BigMat International Architecture Agenda, a cultural blog for the dissemination of the most relevant architecture news and events in Europe, under the direction of Jesús Aparicio Guisado and Jesús Donaire. Client: BigMat International. References: Jesús Donaire (jesus.donaire@jesusdonaire.com)