atlas of vacant spaces Urban vacant land in dense, post-industrial cities remains spatially invisible: absent from open datasets despite its potential to address chronic green space deficits. This thesis “vo:id” is a pipeline detecting, classifying, and prioritizing urban voids using only globally covered open data. Combining OSM-based negative masking, vision-language model classification, and human-in-the-loop validation, … Read more
Can Street Geometry Predict Urban Safety Risk? A machine-learning pipeline that classifies street morphology into risk typologies — from OpenStreetMap features to multi-city deployment, dead ends included. This post documents the full arc of our Urban Safety project — not just the results, but the reasoning, the wrong turns, and what we learned from them. … Read more
This project frames coastal landscapes as systems for circular regeneration, transforming local waste streams into functional ecological infrastructure. Through layered wetland and dune strategies, it explores how material reuse can enhance sediment stability, water quality, and biodiversity while addressing erosion as part of a broader global pattern of coastal and deltaic vulnerability under climate change.
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
Sunburn is a computationally designed urban shading pavilion for Plaça Universitat in Barcelona. The project explores how lightweight canopy structures can improve comfort in public space while creating an inviting social environment. Using parametric column placement, Kangaroo surface generation, Ladybug solar analysis, and Galapagos optimization, the canopy geometry is tested across different sun-hour periods to … Read more
What is an apothecary? The word comes from Greek. Apothēkē — it means storehouse. An apothecary is a place where you grow plants, prepare them, and share them as medicine. This tradition goes back thousands of years until the 19th century, when industrial pharmacy replaced it and the knowledge was lost. Today, we’re bringing it … Read more
TOTEM INTERFACE ELEMENT STONE WALLS SLOPE WALL INITIAL RAMMED PROTOTYPE FINAL RAMMED PROTOTYPE FINAL RENDERS
“If the architecture is any good, a person who looks and listens will feel its good effects without noticing.” — Carlo Scarpa Introduction The GreenInCities Seminar at IAAC explores the potential of circular construction practices and multispecies design within contemporary urban environments. Framed by the GreenInCities initiative in Barcelona, the seminar challenges students to rethink … Read more
Agriculture is not simply another economic sector. It is the foundation of food security, livelihoods and social stability. Yet in many conflict zones, agricultural landscapes are systematically damaged through bombardment, infrastructure collapse, restricted access to farmland, and disruption of water systems. While urban destruction is often visible and extensively documented, the destruction of food-producing landscapes … Read more
Re-envisioning Container City One of Barcelona’s most strategically located waterfront areas, the container port south of Montjuïc, remains largely disconnected from the inner city. As the city explores the possibility of relocating portions of its container operations in this speculative project and transforming this industrial landscape into a mixed-use district, mobility becomes a more pertinent … Read more
Microclimatic Corridor is a proposal for the transformation of Carrer de Rocafort into a climate shelter for non-human urban life. Responding to rising temperatures, biodiversity decline, and the urban heat island effect in Barcelona, the project extends the ecological and microclimatic performance of Jardins de Montserrat into the surrounding street network Climate change as a … Read more
What would happen if our landscapes got inspired in Culture, tradition and seasonality reflecting the core and inner Catalan escence? How could our landscapes being changed? but most important how could we do this? Introduction We began with a simple reframing: instead of adding nature on top of the streetscape, we asked how Catalan culture … Read more
Design for More Than Humans Seminar | IAAC Understanding Local Habitats, Native and Exotic Species What is a Local Habitat? “A place where plants or animals normally live, characterized primarily by its physical features such as topography, plant or animal , soil characteristics, climate, water quality etc and secondarily by the species of plants and … Read more
Across cities, certain spaces resist categorization. They are the unmaintained verges between a planter and a curb, the smooth underside of a bench, the patch of ground that no plan ever claimed. These residual spaces are not accidents — they are the structural byproduct of deliberate spatial organization. Wherever land is planned and programmed with … Read more
