Archives

Construction study and drawing of the Güell Pavillions from Antoni Gaudí for its restoration

Antoni Gaudí designed and constructed these two pavilions for his friend and patron, Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi, between 1884 and 1887. They were inspired by the works of Hercules and the book “L’Atlàntida”, written by Jacint Verdaguer. The whole complex is a homage to Güell’s father-in-law, the Marquis of Comillas, Antonio López. The entrance has two buildings: a stable, and a gatekeeper’s lodge. These two buildings are united by an entrance door with a big metallic dragon and a column with an orange tree above, representing the Garden of the Hesperides and the dragon protecting it.

The buildings are an early project of Gaudí, with an orientalist design on the façades from the Mudejar tradition. The walls are made of mud and bricks and the structure of the barn already has parabolic arches, as in his future projects.

Our work consisted in a 3D scan to achieve a point cloud to be able to redraw the pavillions completely, as the first stage for its restoration. We also analyzed the constructive system, pathologies and advised for the upcoming restoration of the buildings.

Client: IMPUQV – Barcelona Town Hall

Date of completion: 2018

Place: Av. Pedralbes 15, Barcelona.

Team:

Oriol Hostench, commission coordinator

Fernando Álvarez, as a technical advisor.
Felipe Buill, as coordinator of the surveying tasks.
Javier Muñoz, processing director of HEMAV.
Jordi Martínez, Geomatics Technical Director
Laura Marfil, Photogrammetry Operator
Elga Casals, Photogrammetry Operator
Javier Roma, photographer
Makoto Isawa, draftsman
Maria Claudia Escalona, draftsman.

Restoration and museography for the Turó de la Rovira

The set of ruins of an antiaircraft battery from the Civil War and huts from the 60’s,  on Turó de la Rovira, one of Barcelona’s tallest hills, gave the opportunity to the Museum of History of Barcelona (MUHBA) to restore the place and offer a wonderful lookout of the city.

Our work consisted in establishing an acting procedure to restore the interior spaces and advising for the museography of the site. Every building had different uses through time: From the initial military one to a school or different stages of dwellings. The goal was to achieve a full comprehension of the different stages without losing information, highlighting in every space the most important features.

Client: MUHBA

Date of completion: 2015

Place: Turó de la Rovira, Barcelona.

The forms of control of urban heritage in BCN

The city we live in is the result of two different urban processes linked in time and space. The first process is the consequence of the lack of laws and the profit of the private statement in a capitalist system. The second one is a reaction to this freedom which is imposed by the Town Council to equalize the relationship of the citizens with the city they live in, or to activate an economic development that benefits the own Council. This reaction is materialized by means of an increasing control of the regulative factors of the city. This small thesis analyses these controlling forms in the surrounding area of the Rambla de Poblenou, in Barcelona, from its origins until now.

Master thesis held on 2010 for Theory and History of Architecture.
Link to the Thesis ->

Història en obres

The web portal History at Work is a semiannual addressing professionals and students interested in modern architecture’s masterworks. The display of analytic materials –made from a triple vision: graphic and three-dimensional (plans and models), critic and descriptive (texts) and associative (keywords and related works)– strives to furnish different levels of search and approach, all together producing new proposals of the study of the portal’s projects. This publication’s contents are constantly under construction and it is renewed while our graphic material increases and improves.

Coordination: Fernando Álvarez
Team: Pablo Martínez, Jimena Torre, Oriol Hostench.
Link to the site ->

Historic Charter of Barcelona

The Historic Charter of Barcelona is a research project published by means of an online tool, which integrates detailed knowledge about the city history and makes it available to citizens and professionals. It explains the history of the city through the cartographies that describe it, containing 26 maps that have been drawn from texts, historical cartographies, archaeological maps, modern cartography and contemporary digital maps. A committee of historians specializing in the various historical eras has cross-checked and corrected the documents under the direction of the Barcelona City History Museum (MUHBA).

The project also features new contents and geolocates unpublished working documents as the topographical plan that Ildefons Cerdà used to design the Eixample. The documentary sources include maps and aerial photographs from the Cartographic Institute of Catalonia, the Barcelona City History Museum, the Carta Arqueològica de Barcelona, Barcelona Historical Archive, the Cadastre and the Municipal Institute of Informatics (IMI).

The redrawing not only facilitates the review and correction of errors in the old cartographies, less accurate, but also provides a graphic representation that is consistent throughout all the stages. This coherence allows the cartographies to be real in parallel and compare the transformations experienced by the city.

The tool is public and is online. It allows superimposing maps of various ages, incorporating different information -original working documents and other non-morphological data- and drawing on top of the plans. Thanks to these interaction capabilities, the Historic Charter is a great instrument for communication, pedagogical support and research purposes.

The project has a dual dimension: both the content and the cartographic processing/publishing tool, made-to-measure using open source software, which implements a new methodology to streamline and update the information fluently (bug fix, incorporation of new discoveries and historical periods).

The Historic Charter of Barcelona is a pioneering tool in the research and dissemination of urban history, making Barcelona the first city in the world to have a tool of this complexity. The Historic Charter is a document aiming to study the history but also to explain it: a tool to think the future by understanding the past.

Designed and executed together with: 300.000 km/s
Client: MUHBA
Completion: 2015
Link to the project ->

A new trim for the Dymaxion Map

Buckminster Fuller created in 1954 a precise projection of Earth, with the North Pole as the central reference. He minimized the deformation of the continents applying a triangular net projection (specially precise if compared to the Mercator projection), simplifying the sphere into an icosahedron.

The Dymaxion projection was meant to have different possible trims. This new version proposed is accepting the common orientation of North-South and the continuity of the tropic of Cancer.In this way, we obtain a more recognizable plan by the viewers, used to traditional projections. Also the deformation of the continents is minimized, resulting a more proportionate and understandable plan.

Big Time BCN

Big Time BCN is an interactive map of Barcelona that highlights the age of urban plots contrasted with the city’s architectural heritage.

This dynamic cartography offers an insight into more than 2,000 years of history, nearly 70,000 plots and 3,000 protected monuments.

For the first time, complete information on Barcelona’s heritage is available for citizens, professionals and tourists in a synthetic, open and flexible format.

Why BIG TIME BCN?

Even after buildings and walls are long gone, history remains. Sometimes the passing of time is very visible while sometimes it goes unnoticed. The city we have inherited from our ancestors is often diluted with new constructions at the same time as some contemporary buildings try to reference the old ones. Architecture builds the backdrop of our social space and is the scenery on which citizens forge society. The city becomes a space where our past memories coexist with the present moment.

Contemporary heritage is mutable: new assets come into sight while others disappear. Our memory depends on the images we can see and remember. That is why buildings that are forgotten, darkened by dust and pollution, can be lost forever.

This cartography traces the past on the face of modern Barcelona. It aims to explain the current image of the city, which has been shaped over thousands of years of collective conscience. We want people to discover and rediscover the city by making information about the urban environment accessible.

Who is it for?

BIG TIME BCN aims to be a tool for the pleasure of those who love the city of Barcelona. It seeks also to become a reference platform for professionals and students that provides cadastral and heritage information in a novel and effective way.

The cartography represents a first attempt to include several existing databases and archives, most of them still to be digitized or opened. Big Time BCN is useful for visualizing information but also it melds different data sources into a single representation.

Data

We have collected, classified and displayed data from the Directorate General for Cadastre (DGC) and Barcelona Heritage Catalogue (CPAB). At present, information is available but it is difficult to use. We have created a new cartographical base map, which uses data from the DGC and the CPAB, adapting projection systems for a combined display of both datasets.

The Cadastre is an administrative record describing the land property and division. We compiled and displayed cadastral information of Barcelona according to the year of construction of each plot.

The Barcelona Heritage Catalogue is an inventory of architectonic assets, listed by heritage value. We have geolocated the assets depending on the level of protection (A, B or C), associating the catalog details to its geographical position.

Client and authorship: 300.000 Km/s in collaboration with Oriol Hostench
App: Inqbarna
Completion: 2014
Link to the project ->