The 2015 Scholarship award ceremony took place on Thursday 22 October in the Assembly Hall of the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, with the participation of the architect Juan Domingo Santos, jury member of the 2015 Scholarship contest, who gave a lecture entitled "A tower to fly", and the architect Jordi Badía, who presented the topic of the 2016 contest entitled, "A secular chapel".
(Granada, 1961) is an architect from the school of architecture in Seville (1986), professor of architectural projects at the school of architecture in Granada since 1994, visiting professor at the Technischen Univertät München (Germany, 2010) and has been a guest professor at various national and international schools of architecture.
With his work, he develops a research line on the architectural intervention on heritage and transforming landscapes. His projects and works have been selected for international and national exhibitions such as On-Site, New Architecture in Spain organised by the MoMA in New York; the 7th Biennale di Architettura di Venecia; and the Spanish Architecture Biennial (1993-1994 and 2010-2011), among others. He has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe awards, won the Enor Award and obtained an Architecture recognition at the 11th XI Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, and an award at the VIII Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism.
He has recently won the international contest Atrio de la Alhambra with Álvaro Siza.
His book "La tradición innovada. Escritos sobre regresión y modernidad" published by Arquia Foundation in its collection Arquia/Thesis has won the FAD Award for Tought and Criticism in 2014.
His studio is located in the alcohol tower of an old sugar factory in Granada, which he has restored through a revitalisation project and turned the industrial space into a place to live and work. It is a place that has conditioned his way of thinking the relationship between architecture and heritage. At the same time, this activity has become an initiative to rescue this abandoned industrial site. On this subject, he has made the short film A meeting with the film director Juan S. Bollaín, in which his occupation of the factory is told and the experiences carried out since his occupation in 1986.
Barcelona 1961. Architect graduated from the ETSAB in 1989.
Founder and director of the BAAS architecture studio, he combines his professional work as an architect with teaching in the Department of Architectural Projects at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB).
He also writes articles for the ARA newspaper and is the editor of the HIC architecture blog. Together with Félix Arranz, he was the curator of VOGADORS, the exhibition that represented Catalonia and the Balearic Islands at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012.
His most recent works include the Can Framis Museum (City of Barcelona Award 2009 and FAD Opinion Award), the refurbishment of the Oliva Artés factory as the MUHBA Museum of the History of Barcelona, the ALTA DIAGONAL office building and the FAD headquarters.
The studio is currently building, among other projects, the university of cinema, radio and television in the city of Katowice in southern Poland, the headquarters of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Barcelona and a residential building in Palma de Mallorca.
www.baas.cat/es
A secular chapel
A quiet place within a large city.
A place of meditation, calm and reflection that isolates you from the speed and noise around us and puts you in a particularly sensitive spiritual situation.
We have all experienced this effect when we are walking through a large city and decide to enter a church and rest for a while. The physical and sensory experience transforms you for a few minutes. The temperature is different from outside, especially pleasant in summer when it can be a few degrees cooler. Your eyes must adapt to the dark, and they may take a few seconds to do so, in which you have to stop and wait. When you get back on track you can only hear the echo of your footsteps and that is the ultimate expression of silence. The smell of burning wax and incense transports you to a spirituality connected to childhood...
It is an experience similar to when after a long climb to a mountain, you find a small chapel at the top and decide to enter. Solitude and silence.
The proposal is to design a place that provides this type of experience in the big city. A vacuum chamber.
A location in the centre of a large city. The Plaza de las Glòries in Barcelona. A large urban void that in the future will be a large metropolitan park. The piece must, therefore, take into account the current provisional situation of the site, but with its eyes set on the future, when the architecture will be fully integrated into the park's landscape.
To this end, the winning project of the architectural contest organised by the Barcelona City Council, designed by Agence TER and Ana Coello, will be taken as the starting point.
The exact location of the piece will have to be chosen by each designer within this area situated between the streets Cartagena, Badajoz, Consell de Cent and Bolivia.
The size is also open to the criteria of each author, but must be reduced, similar to that of a small chapel.
The references that can illustrate this statement can be very varied: Antoni Tàpies' reflection room at the UPF, the Rothko chapel in Houston, the Bruder Klaus field chapel by Peter Zumthor, the Tindaya mountain project by Chillida, the Sonsbeek pavilion by Aldo van Eyck, the MIT Chapel by Saarinen, etc.
All these architectures are very influenced by the material they are built with. Indoor spaces isolated from the exterior where the façade takes on a subordinate role.
An opportunity to rediscover the essential values of architecture and its potential to transform the human spirit.
Deliverables:
A .pdf file in Din A3 format containing:
Up to 3 pages with the information that the author deems necessary to explain the project: location; plans, sections and elevations to scale; sketches, outlines or diagrams; model photographs, rendered images, perspectives or photomontages and a short report.
The maximum size allowed for the PDF file is 5 Mb.
The length of the report will be up to 500 words and must be included on one of the pages.
