Infrastructure doesn’t just move people. It shapes who they are, where they go, and what kinds of lives are possible. At the northern edge of Barcelona — at the junction of Nou Barris, Sant Andreu, and Santa Coloma de Gramenet — Avinguda Meridiana does all three. It connects the city to its northern territories efficiently. … Read more
Introduction When we imagine a corridor in a typical apartment building, we picture a purely functional passageway — a space designed for movement, not for meeting. These circulation zones are often long, narrow, and socially inert. Yet they structure much of our daily experience of housing, shaping how residents encounter one another. Cohousing projects show … Read more
“Power is not something you possess, it is something you exercise”– Michel Foucault With this phrase by Michel Foucault, I would like to invite you, reader, to adopt a lens focused on power relations as you move through this blog post. The first power dynamic I would like to highlight is the asymmetrical relationship between … Read more
Barcelona Built a Road to the Port. Someone Else Paid for It. In 1992, the city tore down a wall. The old industrial waterfront that had cut Barcelona off from the Mediterranean for over a century was demolished to make way for the Olympic Village. For the first time in living memory, residents could walk … Read more
Our cities have long been shaped around cars — wide roads, narrow sidewalks, and green spaces replaced by parking lots. Cars have quietly become the measure of how we design our streets. But what if cities were designed for people instead? As Fred Polak wrote in Images of the Future, the act of visualizing possible … Read more
Introduction Noise is one of the most pervasive environmental stressors in cities. Long-term exposure has been linked to sleep disturbance, cardiovascular disease, reduced cognitive performance, and lower overall quality of life. Yet despite its importance, detailed noise maps are surprisingly difficult to obtain. Producing official noise maps requires measurements, traffic models, and considerable technical effort. … Read more
Mobility when Tourism outgrows the City Barcelona is the 10th most visited city in the world. In 2024, it received approximately 15.6 million tourists – nearly nine times its resident population of 1.7 million. The issue is not tourism itself. Barcelona’s economy depends on it, and the city’s cultural richness is inseparable from its global … Read more
-A public seafront reclaimed from the port, built on what already exists. Blue Edge proposes transforming a former container terminal in the Port of Barcelona into the city’s first publicly accessible southern waterfront with the focus on the transport system that connects this site with the rest of the city The site sits directly south … Read more
Barcelona is a city that faces many physical limitations to it’s expansion as a metropolis-the mountains contain development within them and the sea borders its other side. For the past 15 years, it has been struggling with an immense wave of tourism that has displaced locals from affordable housing in popular areas and historic neighborhoods … Read more
Col Ashwin – SITA (left) and Taisuke Minagawa (right) Col Ashwin – SITA Col Ashwin is a Senior Lead Enterprise Architect for the Barcelona SITA office and is originally from Kernow (Cornwall, UK). He has worked across the industry as an expert in Robotics, Open Source development, ROS development, Cybersecurity, Systems Engineering, and company compliance. … Read more
Program Team Hyperbuilding 02 proposes a program-integrated transit hub that reorganizes fragmented mobility networks, shortens commute times, and anchors a high-density mixed-use urban core to improve accessibility and urban performance. The design concept for Hyperbuilding 02 begins with a problem: fragmented mobility networks that create inefficiency, congestion, and poor urban accessibility in high-density environments. Rather … Read more
Children’s journey to school, in Bosa Apogeo, Colombia INTRO Bogotá’s growth over the last two decades has been dramatic. The metropolitan area now holds close to 11.8 million inhabitants — a 51% increase in just 15 years. That growth has not been evenly distributed across the city. The city currently ranks 7th in the world … Read more
Shuai Zhang Have you ever felt that parametric architectural design is trapped behind a high barrier to entry? Traditionally, designers and clients must install heavy, complex software just to view or tweak a 3D model. For my final project in the Cloud-based Data Management module, I wanted to break down this barrier. The result is … Read more
Trinitat Nova and Trinitat Vella Scavenger Hunt Moving between the neighborhoods of Trinitat Nova and Trinitat Vella in Barcelona, and reaching natural landscapes nearby, like the Collserola hillside or the Besòs River, can already feel a bit like a scavenger hunt. Large highway infrastructures carve through the area, creating barriers that make simple trips … Read more
A Bee Survival Game Context – Bee-Careful starts in Lisbon, Portugal. Where social (vulnerable young community), environmental (ecological unbalance and fragmentation), and mobility (elderly retired community) problematics are adressed through one common medium; greenery. Greenery forms the binder in which the previous elderly community of Lisbon convverges with a new and young community across a … Read more
This project introduces a high-performance terrace pavilion that merges environmental data with advanced robotic fabrication. The design process began with a comprehensive solar and circulation analysis, identifying thermal hotspots and vantage points to determine the optimal balance between shaded gathering areas and open viewing corners. The resulting structure features a complex, interlocking timber geometry that … Read more
