Studio Eva Prats, Building Communities - ETH Zürich 2019 (HS19) ♦ Flores i Prats

Jana Bohnenblust_dwelling to communal circulation

Stefano Martelli_current state ground floor

Stefano Martelli_intermediate domestic spaces

Joel Brandner_translating urban pre-existing lines

Lorena Bassi_new housing taking the character of the existing

Lorena Bassi_interior towards the garden

Alessandra Ortelli_passatge del caminal-existing

Alessandra Ortelli_densifying existing structures

Alessandra Ortelli_a maze of urban spaces

Alessandra Ortelli_enhancing the spirit of the small streets

Leonce Gruber_strong urban presence protects the inner workings of the block

Leonce Gruber_existing becomes the main circulation

Zelda Frank_permeability to inner courtyard

Zelda Frank_rooftop and balcony connectivity

Zelda Frank_dwelling towards the balcony

Gent Ibrahimi_intervention within a former cinema

Gent Ibrahimi_exploring the spatial qualities of an existing structure

Gent Ibrahimi_from apartment to common hall

Gent Ibrahimi_private to communal contrasting scales

Laura Cereghetti_new form of existing warehouse

Laura Cereghetti_workshop + public gallery

Laura Cereghetti_newly active street life

Livie Weidkuhn_from the street to the ateliers

Magdalena Hermann_connecting different levels

Magdalena Hermann_housing for elderly people

Airas Sanchez_from apartment to the street

Maria Unterlechner_current state and project

Maria Unterlechner_a new terrace and courtyard

Takayoshi Goto_long living along the wall

Takayoshi Goto_mulitigenerational living forms

Alexane Varone_a rich circulation network

Alexane Varone_exploring horizontal circulation

Jingfan Xue_readapting a historical typology of apartments

Stefan Fierz_former workshops to apartments and working spaces

Stefan Fierz_making use of existing volumes

Giacomo Rossi_transition from public to private

Senga Grossmann_Pirelli garage current state

Senga Grossmann_densifying with new volumes

Senga Grossmann_promenade and circulation

Siyi Dai_section co-working, section co-living

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Studio Eva Prats, Building Communities – ETH Zürich
Autumn semester 2019 (HS19)

> See more about the studio
> See dossier about HS19
> See detailed material from each student project at the Studio Eva Prats Website (external link)

Visiting Professor: Eva Prats
Adviser: Ricardo Flores
Teaching Assistants: Àngel Solanellas Terés & Guillaume Guisan

Students:
Lorena Bassi
Jana Bohnenblust
Joel Brandner
Laura Cereghetti
Siyi Dai
Ioana Danila
Stefan Fierz
Zelda Frank
Senga Grossmann
Leonce Gruber
Takayoshi Goto
Magdalena Hermann
Gent Ibrahimi
Stefano Martelli
Alessandra Ortelli
Giacomo Rossi
Airas Sanchez
Anne Sermet
Maria Unterlechner
Alexane Varone
Livie Weidkuhn
Jingfan Xue

The Studio
Building communities implies creating relationships that hold together people and things from different backgrounds and different times, a community between new and old neighbours, between new and old fragments of a built city in which, in the end, everyone, people and things, live in a new unity.

We understand urban rehabilitation as the balance between the recovery of a physical fabric and a social fabric: both complement each other and work at the same time. To read the memory contained in buildings and in people is to think about a future that counts on that past.

The ‘Building Communities’ Studio works with two parallel objectives:

The recovery of a fragmented urban fabric, studying the possibilities of rehabilitation from the insertion of new programs, where housing will be the main but not the only one. The concrete tests of physical transformation of existing structures for the incorporation of houses or other complementary programs, within criteria of sustainability from the rehabilitation of obsolete architectures, is the main working material of the studio.
The definition of the typology of the house and its grouping -the community adapting it each time to the area of the city where it is located.

HS19
This studio focused on a very central fragment of the city of Barcelona, an area of discontinuity between urban fabrics: the neighbourhood of Poblenou and its meeting with the Eixample, the old Cemetery in front of the sea next to large industrial buildings in disuse, the great emptiness of the beaches and public spaces linked to the infrastructures of the Olympic Games of ‘92…

In this part of the city, there are still areas of uncertainty in the boundaries of plots, streets that blur and become exposed, not letting you know where a property starts and where another ends. Changes in direction due to the old traces of the farmlands are mixed with the fragmentation of the plot of the Eixample, generating surprising and unexpected situations that open new possibilities for interpretation and work.

It also mixes the scale of the built fabric, with pieces of single-family housing coexisting with large industrial buildings -many times empty-, and collective housing buildings. The demolition of old houses and factories have produced large open spaces and long distances between buildings, with no intermediate scale between the built and the unbuilt. The demolitions also reveal traces of previous occupations.