Resumen de La excepción. Tres dimensiones de la discontinuidad en el paisaje de la barcelona contemporánea
In this thesis discontinuity is treated as an exception in the discourse or as a spelling license in the urban (con)text. In the first place, interruptions in urban routes are studied, the moments in which flows, movement, lines of the road on the plane stop, change or twist. Secondly, the gaze is raised to the plane of the facades and situations of blind urban dihedral, in which party walls and end walls are analyzed. The semantic potential of the city, the capacity to contain messages and the value, intention and meaning of some of them as revealing of discontinuity are also addressed here. Thirdly, exceptions as voids are observed in the built volume and, more precisely, in its residential matrix: expectant emptyness as trhedral apneas in the urban discourse. These three approaches are added in a narrative of increasing formal and functional complexity supported by a close look and direct experience of the city. The work is complemented with examples from other cities: Castelló, Bilbao, Donostia and Vigo, and contains as a sample a wining proposal for the Affordable Housing Challenge in New York City. The urban fabric of these cities is essentially continuous. Exceptions to this continuity of the urban landscape are rarely presented in its interior grids, in the friction between different fabrics, more frequently in its perimeters and in a striking way in the relationship with its maritime and river coastlines, in contact with its geological features, when mountains manifests themselves in a forceful way, next to the large mobility and collective transport infrastructures and in the contour of some large monofunctional areas of activity. They can be understood as aphorisms of an essentially coherent speech. Using the metaphor of grammatical structures, a cognitive strategy that assimilates the study of the city to that of language: morphogenetics (the genesis of embryonic communicative elements), semantics (meanings that grow complexity) and syntax (the ordering of those distinctive elements) three grammatical referents of great interest to the object of this task. This reading of the urban landscape as a discourse emphasizes the occasions in which its form presents interruptions, inflections or voids; discontinuities in its three material components (subdivision, urbanization, building) and in the three dimensions of space. Exceptions are sometimes loud. Some other times they are like the silences without which music would be just noise. A selection of 62 of the 600 sites from the preparatory material for the different editions of the public participation contest Racons Públics / Recantos Públicos / Hiriko Txokoak / Rincones Públicos is added to six case studies, a revisited of Mitgeres Barcelona de l’oblit al projecte (2007) and Piso Piloto (2015) exhibitions, and multiple notes and references supported by twenty-five years of research experience and teaching commitment with the Barcelona School of Architecture. The work concludes by highlighting the value of the exception in relation to the strength of the urban system, analyzing its causes and consequences, critically evaluating some growth and transformation projects and pointing out future improvement strategies.
