INTRODUCTORY STUDIO G3
METABOLIC ICONIC ROOFS
Seminar Faculty: Javier Peña Galiano and Oriol Carrasco

Metabolic Iconic Roofs studio is about the comprehension of metabolic processes and how they coexist within architecture, what are their inputs and outputs, which are their working environments and the relationship with buildings and the built environment.

Credits: Metabolic Studio

What if the icons that represent a skyline of a city where icons because of its performance, instead of their shape and colour? What if we could change the way we conceive buildings and cities with their world relationship? What if we could change the relationship with both the citizen and the natural environment? What if we could change cities’ landmarks?
By 2050, 70% of the world population will be living in cities, what will the icons of a city be by then?
Barcelona city (as well as most cities in the world) has a very distinctive skyline where architecture icons have become souvenirs and fridge magnets. Tourists can recognize Barcelona with only take a look at materials, locations, colours and shapes. Metabolic roofs studio works around the idea of hacking and retrofitting those icons to transform them into climatic machines that could become the new icons for superpopulated next century cities.
We understand architecture as an ecosystem that results in cities, but what if we could modify that ecosystem via technology, energy and material to fight against climate change? How would the cities look like? Can we apply those new findings into existing cities?

Credits: Metabolic Studio

During the course, we will learn how to be able to recognize those processes and transform energy and material into new inputs and situations that will be used as design drivers for our advanced architectural proposals. Proposals that will be able to transform pre-existing architecture and architectural spaces, society, technology and most important: cities’ natural environments and their relationship with the Planet.

Following established Design With NatureTM research line methodologies, we will focus on the design and elaboration of an architectural project with building scale; but also thinking the relationship that it has with its block, neighbourhood and city.
In parallel, we will also focus on the execution of an unscaled prototype that will be used to validate the proposed hypothesis. This prototype will be also the corroboration that our proposals are on point with the topic of the studio.
The collision between drawings and hyper-drawings, advanced architecture concepts and prototypes, digital and physical will allow us to apply those radical hats to the most important roofs of the city of Barcelona, transforming them and resulting in a new city ecosystem while proposing new ways to fight against global warming.