IS.1 – Introductory Studio g.A
ACTIVE PUBLIC SPACE
Senior Faculty: Edouard Cabay
Computational Expert: Rodrigo Aguirre

MACHINIC PROTOCOLS
Activating the Superilles

This semester the studio continues to question the static condition in architectural design. We will address urban public space, a complex environment in which numerous dynamics converge and coexist; a place that needs precise organisation in order to accommodate events ever changing, unpredictable and unquantifiable. Public space is subject to time, to the unexpected nature of the crowds that inhabit and shape it. It witnesses and accommodates the transformation of society, relates to the advancement of technology and, ever more, is a place where energies converge.

As a collective working group, we’ll target the most important modification to the Eixample’s regular gridded urban fabric in Barcelona: the suppression of cars within some of its neighbourhoods. The “Superilles”, a project promoted by the Agency of Urban Ecology, converts groups of 9 blocks into car free spaces into new social nucleus: a place for the citizen to interact and re-develop the notion of neighbourhood. Consequently, the initiative creates a new typology of public space: plazas resulting from the intersections of two avenues, trapped between the typical cut corners of Cerda’s city blocks, more than 2500 square metres unfold for public use, ready to be activated.

Methodologically, the studio relies on experimental drawing and performative physical modelling as means to explore notions of control and chance in space and time.

On one hand, we’ll construct machines – responsive devices – as articulated mechanisms that operate on their own according to orders – data/inputs/variables – we’ll feed into them; and on the other hand, we’ll set up protocols, language of rules and actions that dictate the behaviour of the machine.

Machinic protocols, as the studio is called, is a notion which can affect the physical, the digital or the conceptual realm, it leans towards a design methodology in which we define intentions and performances, rather than formal outcomes, and recursively play the game of organising matter to provoke unpredictable events.