Students Portofolio 2010-11

The CA institute is an educational institution based in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

CA institute develops educational programs, and proposes the city of Santiago de Compostela as a core element of the education of an architect. In recognition of the unique value of the city´s historic center, Santiago de Compostela was declared a World Interest City by the UNESCO in 1993. The city is also home to an important number of contemporary architectural masterpieces, designed by leading architects –Eisenman, Gallego, Grassi, Hejduk, Kleiheus, Noguerol, Siza, Viaplana, etc.-

Journalism Faculty. Alvaro Siza Lecture

CA institute leverages the city of Santiago de Compostela as an architectural laboratory - first to learn from its excellent historical and contemporary architectural tradition, and, second, to reflect on its urban complexity. As a living example, the city allows students to interact with and learn from architectural experiences.

To develop a tectonic sense of architecture, CA institute´s publications, lectures, congresses and courses always include visits to contemporary projects, located in or near the city and throughout Galicia.

C.S.

COAG Auditorium. Juhani Pallasmaa Lecture

Final Review 2010: Curtis, Drozdov, Maroño, Murado, Rosa.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Philosophy Introduction Project 1: City of Culture connection 2010 1. Alfredo Pimentel.

2. Anna Kulik 3. Danilo Marini.

3. Grant Scott.

5. Marek Kundrata.

6. Mark Rego.

7. Olga Prokopenko 8. Robin Willcox.

9. Group 2010: Ravie Bath Kelly Shaw 2011 10. Levi Tofias.

11. Group 2011: Bob Burgess Jackie Tugman Sean Owen Tayssir Takieddine Timoteo D´Alessandro Zane Bell Project 2: House for artists, Bonaval Park 2011 1. Adryanne Quenneville.

2. Camille Milou.

3. Filipo Puleo.

4. Holy Arnold.

5. Michael Del Valle.

6. Trevor Hughes 7. Toan D.B. Nguyen.

8. Vladimir Gusev.

INTRODUCTION

The students were offered two environments in which to intervene; The jardines de Bonaval, developed by Alvaro Siza and the landscape architect I.Aguirre and the monte Gaias, a hill adjacent to the so called “Ciudad de la Cultura”, by the American architect Peter Eisenman.

From a pedagogical point of view we formulated this studio around a medical metaphor. After traversing both sites the students identified Bonaval as a healthy environment and the Ciudad de la Cultura as an unhealthy environment. The question became one of whether, given the choice, the architect should act on a healthy or an unhealthy body/place. The argument developed that if you are healthy you don’t need a doctor, if you are sick you do. The same argument followed that prevention constitutes the best medical treatment; in the case of “Ciudad de la Cultura” it is obviously too late for that strategy. The next most important moment in medical terms is that of making the right diagnosis and subsequently applying the most judicious and hopefully least invasive treatment. The acupuncture metaphor was presented to the students as an urban design alternative to yet another potential invasive intervention.

The students decided unanimously to dedicate the studio-workshop to develop a non invasive scheme to link the Old city of Santiago to the new “Ciudad de la Cultura”. As an obvious result it was decided to act in team instead of individually so as to map the character of the site in a more holistic and comprehensive way. Extensive research of the territory was done in situ; the students’ bodies becoming pencils themselves slowly drawing on the field while unveiling the archeology and the history of the place; while discovering, identifying and marking potential sites within the site that would inspire local culturally inflected interventions and/or installations. In an all too modest strategy the objective became one of tapping into an existing undervalued- dormant infrastructure, semi urban and semi rural, with an ill defined pre-human scale and an ambivalent human scale. Abandoned ruas, ruined stone walls, lethargic water fountains, topographic accidents, laberinthic nooks and corners, ancestral trees, all proved to inspire the students in their understanding of the past, the present, and a possible foreseeable future based on the notion of cultural sustainability; a cultural sustainability that can perhaps help to override the uninspiring tabula rasa of mega government decision making.

Each student selected two concrete points in where to propose an intervention; twelve of them altogether in what ended up constituting an open ended, loosely knit lace work meant to awaken the forgotten genius loci that lies between the old city and the unforgiving presence of “the new city”. They were free to create the program for each intervention but an emphasis was indeed placed on the architect’s responsibility to help healing, that is to say his responsibility to think simultaneously about how to build (ie: technique & technology), where to build( ie: site & context), and what to build( ie: program). Equal emphasis was placed on how not to build, where not to build and what not to build; a logical corollary to the understanding of cultural sustainability.

I was surprised with the modesty of most of the proposals; refreshingly surprised. No parking structures, no aqua parks, no cable cars to be found. The final results felt like a candid and evocative antidote on the face of an understandably politicized and provocative context. In essence the pedagogical intent of the studio was to foster the use of both intuitive feeling and critical thinking as complementary tools in the design process. Similarly we stressed throughout the workshop the re-thinking of typical dichotomies, ie: tradition-modernity, rural-urban, natural-manmade, space-place, genius loci-locus geni, etc, not as sets of pathological oppositions but as complementary concepts. By proposing that it is actually in the overlap between the two sides of these dichotomies where the richest design solutions can usually be found the students were encouraged to listen to the site from different angles and thus think outside the “box” without necessarily resorting to over- aesthetizised designs. An open round table discussion between Juhani Pallasmaa and myself hopefully helped to anchor the students’ sensibilities in this regard. Similarly a series of parallel lectures throughout the duration of the studio emphasized the anthropological, archeological, sociological, and phenomenological roots of architecture; all of them organically supporting the objectives of the studio. In the end result I like to think that this studio offered the students the opportunity to design stereoscopically, that is to say allowing for both their sensual sensibility and their social sensibility to act in balanced dialogue with each other.

Note: It was encouraging to find out later that the city of Santiago de Compostela has approved and is already implementing a series of acupuncture interventions not unlike our studio’s proposals that contemplate the conversion of vehicular streets back into pedestrian oriented ruas as well as the revitalization of the botanical architecture of the city; as an architectural critic has put it: “surely a lesson on civism.”

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Alberto Foyo Professor, City College, NY & Columbia University

Corrubedo House. David Chipperfield Lecture

Paideia Auditorium. William J.R. Curtis Lecture

Final Review 2011: Conde Roa, Curras, Curtis, Estevez, F.Prado, Maro単o, Pallasmaa, Rosa.

Project 1: City of Culture connection

Alfredo Pimentel, Houston, Texas, EE.UU He graduated from the University of Houston in 2009 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture and has received design awards for his senior thesis project “Campus and City”. He is now currently pursuing a Masters Degree of Architecture under the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s M.Arch II program.

Before into graduate school, He was employed under local Houston firms such as James Ray Architects and Natalye Appel + Associates Architects.

Sketchs Location: Ciudade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Views Cutting open into the sloping site, this landscaped void provides a continuation and a formal connection between the settled outskirts of the historical city of Santiago de Compostela and the new City of Culture that was originally envisioned by Peter Eisenman. Providing this void between the past and the present gives a chance for time to set the tone of the dialogue between these two entities. As a result of scattered planted conditions, the gardens and the landscape elements will create unique experiences depending on certain times of the season.

The open yet sheltered void aims to continue and reflect the containment of movement and life within the sheltered and open streets of Santiago.

Comprised of two monolithic retaining walls buttressed by walkways and planters, the gardened path opens at the foot of the hill, compresses at the middle, and then opens again at the plaza of Eisenman’s City of Culture.

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Alfredo Pimentel

Photo Aerial with the proposal

Transitional Landing into the City of Culture

Sitting Area With Overhead Aromatic Garden

Retaining Pool

Trail

Entry Plaza

VOID & CONTAINMENT

Aromatic Botanical Gardens for the City of Culture

Plan Alfredo Pimentel Overall Plan 1:500

Anna Kulik, Moscow Russia I am Anna Kulik. I am from Russia, Moscow. Before participating the program of CA I was studying in Moscow Architectural Institute (MArchI).

After this workshop I felt deeply in love with Spain. Now I’m doing my Masters in IaaC in Barcelona.

Conceptual Drawings Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

View What is the Site?.. What can we find there?.. Why do we go there?.. Should we motivate people to go to the Eiserman’s building or not?

During all the time I was thinking about making some kind of path – or paths, which will connect the city of Santiago with the Eiserman’s building, but then I realized that there is no point to make these paths in one special way. The site is a perfect place for a park, where people can make their own choice and go wherever they want; find their own “special places”.

Then I found some viewpoints on the Site and decided to make there these small esplanades, where people can go and find the best view. There are situated small granite pavilions, where people can hide during the rain. These pavilions you can’t see neither from the top nor from the bottom of the hill. They are hidden and suddenly you can find one of them, and reach your view by climbing on one of them.

So this is not the real connection between the city and the building, you can go anyway, but you are not really motivated to reach any special place. Esplanades with their pavilions disappear the same way they appear. You can find them, or not, you can go somewhere you want fast and strait, or you can have a nice long quiet walk; anyway – it is a decision, which you make by yourself.

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Anna Kulik

Danilo Marini, Boston, EE.UU I live in Boston Massachusetts and study architecture at the Boston Architectural College. I am in my fourth year at the Boston Architectural College. I currently work for M&L Construction working as a laborer and doing design-build projects.

Conceptual Drawing Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Site Plan The main concept I worked with during this project was to be sensitive towards the landscape and create a place were visitors can see the culture of Santiago by interacting with the local farmers. Agriculture is a major part of the culture of Santiago and is diminishing as the city expands, so this area is meant to give back to the people of Santiago and allow them to cultivate the many traditional crops. The site incorporates granite walls which serve as boundaries, tool storage, and benches.

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Danilo Marini

Grant Scott, Boston, EE.UU Grant Scott is a recent graduate of the Boston Architectural College, currently working for Sasaki Associates in Watertown Massachusetts.

Graduating from the Boston Architectural College in January 2011 with a B.Arch as Valedictorian, Grant now plans on applying to graduate institutions to continue his architectural education.

Perspective Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Preliminary Ideas Mediation not Connection The tension between the ancient city of Santiago de Compostela and the so-called city of culture is both physical, in that the new building is out of scale with the rest of the surroundings, and in a less tangible subconscious way, with the use and program being relatively undefined such that there is a void to be filled with ‘something’.

My project seeks to further illustrate this tension with a landscape gesture which hints toward the ‘connection’ requested in the design brief, but stops short of actually connecting the ‘City’ and the ‘City of Culture’, while providing a series of open spaces for visitors to look back toward the ‘Old City’, and the real reason people come to Santiago de Compostela The mediation also happens between the natural landscape and the hardscape of the stairs in a gradiation of natural landscape, softened ‘lawn’, pea-stone and then granite hard-scaping in a secondary gradient created laterally on site.

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Grant Scott

Construction

Site Plan Grant Scott

Marek Kundrata, Prague, Czech Rep. Studying at AAAD in Prague under Prof.Ing.Arch. Ivan Kroupa. Works for architect Sami Rintala on several projects of refurbishing norwegian old barns. Participating on workshop of gaudi competition winners for DEC 2011 in Belgium. Participation on India building workshop to develope a regional micro ecological turism JAN 2012

Idea Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Site Plan The concept is to work with the po¬tential and materials founded on the site The site is located between the two cites. The City of Culture and histocial centre of Santiago de Compostela. The goal is to make connections both physical and visual.

The key point is to work with the materials on the site, history and potential. The large area of 300000 sq m. requires variety of uses, both public and private.

The upper part of the slope has never been cultivated because of steep hill and rock right below the surface. My proposal is to move this remaining soil to the lower part and provide enough soil for a trees to grow. The trees are situated in a ring creating a vi¬sual barrier a shade between the public space terraces curved in the rock and private agriculture below. People who wish to access the city of culture or just to walk the dog have to take the closest path between the fields (compression), then to pass the bar¬rier of oaks (revealing), and appear below the terraces. They can take number of stairs leading up, they can fol¬low the path trited in the wild grass or find their own. When the soil is too wet they can walk on the wide edges of the terraces and experience the massivness of the rock, the textures, colours, smell.. If someone follows the terrace edge long enough it will reveal him totally different experience. The path stays the same but the surroundings change to massive natural rock.

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Marek Kundrata

Mario Somonte, Asturias, Spain.

I was born in Valdesoto (Asturias, Spain). I studied architecture at the University of La Coru単a (Coru単a,Spain) and the Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen,Scotland). I am currently studying Civil Engineering at the Alfonso X el Sabio University (Madrid,Spain) and EWHA University (Seoul,South Korea).

Section Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Site Plan We were asked for design a connection between the “Old city of Santiago” and the “City of Culture”, both of them have a big scale and a physical conflict, and we had to find the way to connect these two iconic buildings of Santiago. My proposal it was to connect the “Old city of Santiago” and “The City of Culture” by creating a delicate path with the minimum materials from the site, in this case soil, water, vegetation and granite. This route will provide the visitors and citizens a series of observatories along the path to look at the panorama of the “Old City” and to provide physical and visual relationships. At the same time water sheets and pools follows the path providing refreshing and meditation atmosphere. The path is aligned with the existing vegetation, the rocks and the slopes to create different inclinations and water situations around the path. The water coming from the big amount of rainfall is managed from the City of Culture, through the path and falls to the river as the natural water cycle.

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Mario Somonte

Mark Rego, Boston, EE.UU I was born in Portugal and live in Boston, EE.UU. I study in Boston Architectural College. .

Preliminary Ideas Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Model Perspective At the CA Institute Summer Program we were asked to create a connection to the new city of culture, projected by Architect Peter Eisenman, located at the top of the Gaias Hill in Santiago de Compostela.

My proposal was to create an infrastructure that beyond the physical connection to the top of the hill, it also mediated Eisenman’s project with old Santiago. The project becomes a series of path that connect the bottom of Gaias hill with the City of Culture at the top. The paths are aligned with some of the surrounding elements and are cut into the ground in an act of subtracting what is existent, the wild landscape, and replacing it with the rigid geometry of the paths.

Along the way areas with flexible program are introduced. These areas can be used for outside concerts, theatrical plays, gatherings or simply to rest and enjoy the views towards the old city.

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Mark Rego

Site Plan

Plans Mark Rego

Olga Prokopenko, Kharkiv, Ukraine I was born and live in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Recent study in Kharkiv State University of Architectural and Construction.

Section Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

View The project is dealing with the surrounding areas to the City of Culture mainly with the street that surrounds Gaias hill.

The street and specially the sidewalks are redisigned with the intention of becoming a place to stay, a place to enter different spaces excavated inside the mountain. Spaces that will contain different type of services for the people that will come to visit the CdC -commercial, culture-

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Olga Prokopenko

Robin K. Willcox, California, EE.UU Ms Kneeland-Willcox is in the final year of the Master of Architecture program at the Boston Architectural College in the USA. Her work experience has been primarily in residential architectural design and master planning (at Carr, Lynch, Hack and Sandell in Cambridge) and town planning (on the Planning Board in the town of Hamilton, MA). .

Site Plans Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Section Our challenge was to make a meaningful link between the new City of Culture on Gaias hill with the existing city of Santiago de Compostela across the valley.

There exist some garden walking paths around the city, from the Alameda, along the Sarela river, around the north to the university, and to the Parque de Bonaval. I proposed to extend those to our site hillside below the City of Culture and beyond to the Parque do Paxonal, to make a complete ring.

I chose to develop a very small and delicate piece for that ring path, primarily for the use of the residents that live just nearby. It is a small stone swimming pool, a destination of discovery and contemplation hidden amid a reforested hillside. The pool connects to the City of Culture just above and behind it by collecting its runoff water, purifying it through a long pebbled trough en route to the pool. It connects to the historic city mentally: through contemplative views across the horizon, and through the use of stone construction echoing the walls found in the Bonaval Garden.

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Robin K. Willcox

Ravie Bath, California, EE.UU I was born in California and live and study in Brooklyn, New York. Recent study in Pratt Institute.

Kelly Shaw, Massachusetts, EE.UU. I was born and live in Massachusetts. Recent study in Massachussetts Institute of Technology.

Plan and View Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Group 2010

General Section Students were asked to come up with a site intervention on a large sloped hill between the new City of Culture designed by Peter Eisenmen and the Old City of Santiago de Compostela that would act as a connector between the two. The proposal for my intervention included activating the existing space by creating a field condition that allows the site to grow organically overtime.

Due to the heavy amounts of rainfall in Santiago I interpreted the site as a potential water drainage system. Taking the simple idea of water flowing down to the river, situated at the bottom of this terrain, I decided to channel the rain water down in small canals. These canals are paired with a walkway so the visitor is always surrounded by water. Throughout the progression from either direction, the areas around the path and canal are developed as public plazas where the water is either collected in a pool, used as irrigation or directed to the river. Using the process of triangulation, the site slopes are exaggerated to create valley and peak conditions to manage the water. Manipulation of these triangles then creates all kinds of opportunities to create various public spaces such as shelter spaces, pools, plazas, planting zones and irrigation field.

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Ravie Bath and Kelly Shaw

N

Site Plan 1 : 2000

Growing Diagram

Site Plan 1 : 1000

Site Plan N

Ravie Bath and Kelly Shaw

Sections

Perspectives Ravie Bath and Kelly Shaw

Timoteo, Jackie, Bob, Sean, Tayssir, Alberto and Zane.

Bob Burgess

I grew up and currently live in North Yarmouth, Maine. I attended Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island where I received my Bachelors of Architecture as well as my Master of Architecture in May 2011. I enjoy spending my free time exploring the untamed side of the world.

Jackie Tugman

I am an interior design graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, USA. My dedicated passion for recognizing connections between all design fields attracted me to the CA Institute. I am indebted to Santiago de Compostela for providing incredible cultural and architectural encounters on every scale.

Tayssir Takieddine

I born and lived in Damascus-Syria. Graduated from the university of Kalamoon in Syria, department of architecture in 2009. Worked at Al-Mufti ateliers in Damascus on the renovation of an old house in the old city.

Winner of the honorable mention in the the Sham spiritual oasis competition with the collaboration with one of my colleagues.

Timoteo D´Alessandro

Graduated at TUDelft University in Border Condition studio led by Oscar Rommens with a thesis on El Principe, a Moroccan spontaneous settlement; Bachelor degree at RomaTre University with Francesco Cellini. Has been working in Holland, Spain and Italy. His main subject of research are social and political investigations.

Sean Owen

I am a recent graduate of the College of Architecture and Design at Wentworth Institute of Technology with a Master of Architecture. Currently I am living in Brooklyn, New York and working as a Project Manager for Space Architects in New York City.

Zane Bell

I am pursuing a bachelors in Architecture at the BAC. I am in my first year.

This is a career change for me and I am chasing my dream. I am originally from South Africa and am now living in Boston.

Group 2011

Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2010

Bob Burgess

Model During our stay in Santiago we had the opportunity to fully immerse ourselves in the culture which allowed us to identify the benefits and the shortcomings of the existing, new, and the possible future development and structure of the city. There were three main sections selected to study further, the old city, the City of Culture, and everything in between. A beginning, an end, and the connections between what makes you go from A to B or B to A or even P to Z. How and why do we choose the paths we do and what changes can be made to create a cohesive and enticing experience.

Solutions to these problems came in a variety of different forms, some that simply identified critical elements of the past and others that called for the complete revision of existing structures and surrounding infrastructure. All solutions were geared towards revitalization and union of the past, present, and future appearance and function of the Santiago de Compostela.

Group 2011

Jackie Tugman

Model The 2011 CA Institute challenged a group of six international design students to cultivate a connection between the city of Santiago de Compostela and the Cidade de Cultura. Discovering the two most direct, but distinctly different pedestrian links was the starting point for considering a cultural propagation between the civic dichotomies. The process of developing architectural interventions in key points along the looped route was an exercise to discover the qualities inherent to Galicia: water and stone.

To circumvent this seemingly insurmountable connection, the solution cannot be thought of as a directional path, but rather a radiating reclamation from Santiago de Compostela’s agricultural heart. The verdant river valley is now the locus of reparation. A phytoremediation park on the hillside synthesizes age-old terraced landscapes with the social fabric of both historic and contemporary Santiago. This park subtly cleanses the new building’s waste water by filtering it through ponds between terraced esplanades. These esplanades correspond to the Spanish tradition of picnics in the countryside and act as balconies for viewing the old city.

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Group 2011

Tayssir Takieddine

Sections As a member of the team who worked on the project which aimed to solve the connection problem between the old city of Santiago and the city of culture, i can say that it was a great chance to explore the city from many different layers through a closer and deeper view. The process of the connection was modeled by the proposed trip that the visitor is going to start from the old city main gate which was historically one of the city entrances. During this spontaneous journey the visitor will stop by many identified points each one of them is going to be treated in a way that reflects its own character, in that case the project could be summarized as parts from the whole, and a whole that connects the parts. One of the stops that i have worked on was the “ancient bridge� area, which was the last station before the visitor starts to climb the hill where on top of it the city of culture was located, however the suggestion was to design a bikerike to give people the chance to enjoy their journey in a different way of movement and view.

The design was inspired by the amazing order of the granite stone that the city was known of, and as the images show there was a paradoxical relation between the dynamic movement of the bike and the constant stability of the stone which were joined together in a way that reflects the character of the place specifically, and the identity of the city in general.

Group 2011

Timoteo D´Alessandro

Model Section Santiago de Compostela urban fabric is characterized by a continuity of scenographic squares that lead the observer to discover the city as a narrative layered over time. Recent expansion, such the Eisenman project, represent a rupture of this continuity. Therefore the aim of the intervention has been to rediscover a path of events, blossoming from the existing pattern of the city, and qualified by various pauses, that stimulate the experience of pilgrims and citizens, while establishing a connection. A series of paradigms has been used to analyze the project sites in order to achieve an understanding of the main issues that affect the relationship between the historical center and it’s outward expansion.

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Group 2011

Sean Owen

Section The project that was produced was in regards to making a connection between Santiago and Peter Eisenman’s project that is located on the hill adjacent to the city. The problem that the group faced was how to connect the two together to create a single city. This proved to be difficult as the existing city is a walking city and the current means of travel to Eisenman’s Project is by other means of transportation, either by bus or car. The group determined that with new pedestrian pathways through the city that had destination points along the way, such as rediscovering hidden spaces within Santiago and reviving areas with new plazas, would prove to integrate Eisneman’s Project within the existing urban fabric that is Santiago.

Group 2011

Zane Bell

1. university square 2. vantage point 3. stepped terraces 4. reading room 5. art house 6. new treshold 7. colexiata S.M.Sar 8. roman bridge 9. phytoremediation 10. creek promenade 11. bridge 12. highway tunnel 13. terraced stairs 14. look out point 15. granite walkway 16. terraced houses 17. Abastos market

Site Plan Our team project was geared towards urban planning. We had to focus on site analysis and based on these findings design a series of urban interventions and installations. These holistic interventions are intended to create a dialog between the old city of Santiago de Compestela and Peter Esienman始s City Of Culture. We immersed ourselves in the urban character, cultural genetics and ambiance of the town and through a series of lectures and tours we became aware how to be socially responsible as architects. This involved the study of: the symbiosis of the old and the new, urban character, interrelationships with spaces, social genetics and the activation of spaces through the recapitulation of the local vernacular.

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Group 2011

Levi Tofias, New York, EE.UU Levi discovered his interest in design after earning an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Skidmore College in New York. A summer program at Harvard University encouraged his passion for architecture, leading him to begin his Master’s studies at the Boston Architectural College. Levi is also an avid photographer, musician; his work can be seen at obscuralucida.com.

Sketch Location: Cidade da Cultura. Date: 2011

Collage Our assigned task was to reinforce the connection between Santiago de Compostela and the Ciudad de Cultura. In order to strengthen the relationship between the two areas, first, the Ciudad de Cultura needs to establish an identity. There have been criticisms of the buildings and their budget, in part because it is hard to imagine what they could, and must, become.

My proposal is not about Eisenman’s buildings; it is about what it means to be a cultural community. The power of architecture is that it is alive, and like culture, the ways we interact with it makes it part of us. To really be a “city of culture”, the Ciudad de Cultura needs to be more than performance spaces and libraries that people visit like an architectural Disneyland. It needs a community of artists and creatives to make art, push new ideas, question old ones, to form a place to perform and live.

The solution is to insert an artist community into and on top of Eisenman’s buildings. Filling in the cracks between the buildings, and taking over inhabitable spaces in the expansive plenums artists’ studios and live/work spaces could make this city grow, as it must, organically. The artificial landscape that Eisenman has created is incredibly ripe with potential, but it is like a blank canvas, a barren topography. The real genius loci needs to be created and needs people who can foster this sense of place. Artists are the catalysts, colonizing a giant work of architecture to bring meaning to these empty vessels.

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Levi Tofias

Trip Vigo. Students 2010

Tour Cidade da Cultura by Peter Eisenman.

Trip Coru単a. ExteriorHarbor. Students 2010

Project 2: House for artists, Bonaval Park

Adryanne Quenneville, Toronto, Canada I graduated May 2011 having completed a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Science at Ryerson University. In addition to working at an architecture firm, I am currently involved in the design of a health clinic and school to be built in the Democratic Republic of Congo – a volunteer humanitarian project.

Site Model Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model Life Along The Wall Artists’ residence in Bonaval Park, Santiago de Compostela, Spain In Santiago de Compostela there are two primary concerns with regards to building and the landscape. One of these concerns is over the limited space available for construction and the other regarding the deforestation occurring in the region. Thus, it is necessary to question the site given for the artists’ residence: Bonaval Park. Rather than building in the park, this proposal suggests a reconsideration of the site and proposes to build adjacent to it. The project’s site is limited to a couple small, triangular, ‘leftover’ pieces of land at the limits of the park. The edge of this park is an old stone wall. This wall embodies Santiago as a city of layers – two of which can clearly be seen as separately built portions of the wall. This urban infill project proposes to add new layers by inhabiting the wall. In order to do so, the wall is highlighted and manipulated for new uses – much like other walls found within the city. The wall becomes a path, a piece of furniture, access, a city builder… The building is composed of a public ground floor, a layer of private bedrooms above and shared spaces for the artists on the third floor (model). The project also acts as a uniting force to both ends of the street in an area currently undergoing revitalization (site model).

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Adryanne Quenneville

Camille Milou, Paris, Francia My name is Camille Milou, I come from Paris, France. I have studied architecture in the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris Lavillette. I became interested in architecture by travelling with my family in Greece and Turkey during my childhood. I am also very interested in music, litterature and sports.

Model Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model This projectis a simple and compact building, on the top of the park. It uses the mysteriousquality of its location to revealitsmonolithic prĂŠsence, as a strongelementdisapearing in the trees.

It reactswith the urbancontext of the Northstreet to findits position inside the garden. The courtyard on the streetsideleads to the privateartist’sspaces. On the otherside, the building intergrates an existingpaththatleads to the public entrance. The exhibition spaces are located on the top floorwhichprovides a view point above the trees.

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Camile Milou

Filippo Puleo, Palermo, Italy.

Filippo Puleo, born in Palermo in 1986. Educational background: High School in Catania, Bachelor in Environmental Architecture Politecnico of Milano.

After a three months internship in LOT-EK Studio, New York City, he is going to sign up for the Master in Architecture in Roma Tre University. He loves music, sport, photography, architecture, travel.

Image Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Section Tipe My idea is to equip the unit of a common space for the artist, characterized not only by privacy, but also by permeability and accessible to the public; to occupy as little space as possible; to locate the project at the top of Bonaval Park, the more reserved area that i salso close to the path and to a secondary entrance.

The complex consists of two linear two storey volumes, partially sunken into the ground, close to the boundary wall and parallel to the contour lines.

The two buildings contain the common area with arcades.

The one closer to the wall is made up of cells upstream modular m. 6X7; with the studios on the ground floor and housing on the first floor, which can also be accessed by the opposite side near the wall. In the central part there are a kitchen and communal living.

The second contain the common services. At the second floor, that is connected to the common area, the are the school, the auditorium and the library for the artists. At the ground floor, that is directly open to the park and to Santiago, there are the bar, the library, and an exhibition space for the public.

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Filippo Puleo

Holy Arnold, Virginia, EE.UU My design background includes a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Interior Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. I am currently a Candidate for Masters of Architecture at the Boston Architectural College in Boston, MA and completing my third year in the program. I balance my life between school and two jobs – as a Server in a restaurant and also a Teaching Assistant for a studio at school. The time I spend outside of work and school is mostly outdoors and with friends.

Section Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Conceptual Sketch The project is sited in Boneval Park, where Alvaro Siza’s design forms a relationship with the existing ruins in order to evoke an experience of procession as the outdoor space steps up the slope of the hill. Through spending time at the site, I closely studied how the paths, terraced levels and ruins create progressively dynamic spaces within the fortified walls of the park. My parti focused on activating these moments while granting access to the artist complex for the public.

The granite benches placed by Siza correspond to the existing ruin walls at the higher level of the park. These are human scaled moments for park users to pause and rest along their procession to the tree covered top of the hill. I proposed to use the building ruin as a gallery space by simply glazing the arched openings and building new adjacent artist spaces into the earth. The existing benches and wall ruins above would remain and become part of the building to form exterior walls. This encourages park users to physically engage with the building, while not disrupting their procession along the paths. The artist lofts were deliberately located as a separate building at the top of the hill, creating a clear separation between the private and public programmatic elements. The top of the hill is the final destination delivered as a user moves along their path. It is quiet and nestled in the abundance of trees, creating a place for rest and reflection upon the end of procession from the Center for Contemporary Art at the bottom of the park.

Holly Arnold 57

Jin Park, Macon, South Korea.

I currently live in Berkeley, CA finishing up my senior year at UC Berkeley.

I was originally born in South Korea, but my hometown is Macon, GA. My other interests outside of architecture are drawing, traveling, playing soccer, and trying to be a normal college kid whenever I’m not stuck in studio.

Conceptual Sketch Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model Recognizing the previous development to Bonaval Park by Alvaro Siza, the House of Artists is seen as a continuation of his logic in making further developments to the park. Away from the excellent spaces created by Siza and the pristine natural spaces between numerous Oak trees, the project is located at the top of the park. At this site, Siza’s logic is continued to create two different terraces allowing the existing landscape to continue flowing up. The idea is then leveraged further to house the programs under the two terraces: The upper terrace houses private programs while the lower terrace houses public programs. In order to bring light into the spaces, courtyards are created allowing adjacent spaces to receive light.

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Jin Park

Laura Schneider, Munich, Germany.

Born in Nurnberg, Germany, I grew up in Germany and Portugal. In southern Europe I became facinated with forms, light and spaces. Now i am a student of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich and have completed an exchange year at the Faculdade de Arquitectura at UTL, Lisbon, Portugal. Besides architecture my interests are people, places, blury photographs, books and idealistic behaviour.

Conceptual Sketch Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model Seven spaces for seven invited artists. In Santiago de Compostelas Bonaval Park designed by Siza, I have created a new space to live, work and comunicate in. This Park is rich with different impressions, shapes, light and views, which all change constantly when walking through At the same time, there exists an interesting interaction of a few elements composed in many different ways – all protected by its old surrounding stonewallls. By the procession of the paths arises a ditstancing to the city The open and geometrical landscape next to the CGAC guides into a more natural environment.. Light alternates, surface changes, materials get less controled.

My proposal is to add a respectful gesture to such a complete space: Following the concept of procession through the park, the new buildings track the topography of the space and the development of the existing paths. Naturally the visitor is guided along the public spaces and the users into the more private courtyard of the composition. Refering to Santiagos monestary architecture the volumes open up to an inner square and propose a place of encounter and visual communication. The element of the wall is to give protection, limits and direction. This is reflected by guiding the existing part into the new. The idea of small openings is transfered to the buildings exterior so as materials respond to the enviroment of Bonaval Park.

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Laura Schneider

Michael Del Valle, Boston, EE.UU I was born in Boston, Massachusetts; raised in the wilderness of Derry, New Hampshire; and was taught architecture at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. I enjoy skateboarding, snowboarding, and anything with two wheels.

Site Plan (2.2) Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Image (2.1) The aim of the project, to create a collaborative environment for 7 foreign artists to live/work, contradicts the programmatic requirements, which calls for separate apartments and studios.

In an attempt to create a collaborative environment the living and working areas are combined into shared spaces, simultaneously decreasing square footages as well as the project’s impact on the site.

The site, Bonaval Park, is a remarkably rural departure from the urbanity that is Santiago de Compostela. As a result the park has an inexplicable air of sacredness, such that any additions to the park would cause an immediate interference. However, past park additions have been made nearly invisible by their subtleness (2.2).

Therefore the gallery/studio simply allies itself with the uppermost stonewall. Its façade is three skewed stonewalls, recreating the park’s previous condition of stone enclosure while echoing the skewed lines of Alvaro Siza’s museum at the park’s base.

Finally, the housing portion of the project hovers over the stonewall façade (2.1), the foreign nature of which is representative of the artists that it houses. The intrusive nature of this architectural form is negated by its hovering, which keeps it from ever touching the park’s sacred ground.

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Michael Del Valle

Trevor Huges, Boston, EE.UU I live in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA. I have a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of New Hampshire and I am currently working on a Master’s degree in Architecture at Boston Architectural College. I enjoy being in the outdoors, skiing, hiking and kayaking. I have a passion for History and am a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies. I would like to someday soon buy a New England 17th or 18th century home and restore it.

Sketch Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model My program was to create seven grottos for artists to sleep and work along with an exhibition space for the artists to display their work. I was given two sites to study. The first site was Bonaval Park and the second site was the city of culture. I generated my concept models by using physical features of Bonaval Park. After carefully studying Bonaval Park I realized that it was too beautiful of a park to intrude upon with a new complex of buildings. The site I chose to construct the Grotos was at the top of the temporary construction road that leads to the City of Culture. This road had destroyed the existing landscape, making it a perfect place to create Bonaval inspired Grotos. These Grotos would use the leftover stone discarded from the site of the City of Culture to create the structure of the Grotos as well as the walking paths and retaining walls. The stone walls will be built in the traditional way with the stone being load bearing, mimicking the ancient buildings that dot the landscape of Santiago De Compostela.

Having artist live near the city of culture will be the first step in connecting the old city with the new city.

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Trevor Huges

Toan D. B. Nguyen, Saigon, Vietnam 1981 Born in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam 2004 Bachelor of Architect, Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture (HUARC) 2004-2008 Worked with Liberty Architect (Lib. A), Vietnam 2009-2010 Worked in CREA of HUARC

Perspective Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Preliminary Drawings Understanding the site: The wall system dominates the site. It plays the role of both separating and connecting the juxtaposition spaces. By building the CGAC in the gap in-between the monumental monastery and the city of Santiago, architect Alvaro Siza did not only introduce a connection between them but also strengthen the power of the wall system and give the city a green space to breathe.

His action revived the place. However, outside the northern wall of the park, there is still an abandoned alley which remains dark, dirty and dangerous.

The project: To give the alley a life. Use the strategy of the design of CGAC: introduce a connection, activate the edge of the site, strengthen the wall system, preserve the green space, and revive an abandoned place. A long sequence of narrow spaces will be inserted into the northern wall and continually connected to the ruin arcades which will be converted into a gallery.

All flats float above the studios and have separate entrances from the alley. The studios connect to the gallery and the main entrance from the park. Then, they can serve as exhibition space when needed. The cut at the bottom of the wall’s corner provides people who climb up the park’s hill with a glance of the street and vice versa.

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Toan D. B. Nguyen

Section and Plans

Site Plan Toan D. B. Nguyen

Vladimir Gusev, Moscow, Russia.

I was born and live in Moscow, Russia. Currently working on diploma project in Moscow Architectural Intitute (MARHI). Besides architecture, I like painting, making photos with old film cameras, riding bike to my job instead of spending time in traffic jams, and I’m strongly addicted to collecting old vinyl records.

Sketch Location: Bonaval Park. Date: 2011

Model Each new project should be the result of resolving old problems and bringing new advantages.

Analyzing the Bonaval park, I understood the need to be architecturally-calm and totally rational in my future project. I found a beautiful old ruined house, standing by the old wall of the park and tried to give this house second life by making a gallery in it. New parts of my project are supposed to make background for this old building and look as transparent as possible, so the main facade has lots of glazing. I put the «beam» with studio spaces on the old building, which plays with it in terms of constructional horizontal spacings and works as an observation deck to the old city. The «beam» comes out of dense-tree part of the park and can be used by the citizens. Opening gallery to both sides of the stone wall and placing housing for artists in the existing ruined row of buildings (which are to be reconstructed) makes life injection to the forgotten part of the city, that is currently used in not the most rational way.

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Vladimir Gusev

CHIPPERFIELD ON THE BEACH AND OTHER COMPOSTELAS

One warm breezy summer morning, a couple dozen architecture students and professors from the Compostela Architecture summer program traveled to the Galician coast to visit David Chipperfield’s summer house. It was a treat to get inside the house, which on one side perches on a small beach, and on the other squeezes between other houses crowding the tortuous old main street. It was also a treat to be hosted by the architect and his family, with plenty of jamón and local fresh cheese, and to linger at the table musing about the strange exaggerated program of a summer house: the usual trappings of our busy lives are absent, we parcel out a bit of office time and office space to keep our regular lives elsewhere going, but mostly we are occupied with new concerns, such as how to keep sand out of the house (in the case of Chipperfield’s house a shower is matter-of-factly introduced between the entrance from the beach and the rest of the house).

The reference for the title of this essay is Robert Wilson’s operatic work “Einstein on the Beach,” his collaboration with the composer Philip Glass that resulted in a radical new kind of opera. Wilson and Glass set out to place a major historical figure in quotidian contexts so that the opera becomes a poetical portrayal of a personage rather than the more typical grandiose historical narrative, the term “beach” used metaphorically to describe the casual and informal setting in which the otherwise epic character is placed. Similarly, Compostela Architecture is a program founded with the purpose of offering an alternative architectural experience to the contemporary architecture studio. The faculty, teaching in Europe and North America the rest of the year, spend the summers getting the students in the program to slow down and slowing down with them; to produce architecture, yes, but to delay the grand gesture in favor of the accumulated moments arising out of quotidian, less abstract, more directly experienced environments.

Of course, unlike the opera, which uses beach merely as a metaphor, Chipperfield’s summer house and other sites visited (as well as the students and faculty themselves...) are literally on the beach, and this leisure context is an important component of the program. We all have seen summer study programs hint at the vacation-like settings in an effort to lure students, but in this case the Galician cultural context—the beaches, the coasts, the food, the street feasts—act as a kind of priming device for the pedagogical goals of the program.

Galicia is the distant corner of the Iberian Peninsula, until recently with limited transportation access and visitors, save for the committed pilgrims arriving at the tomb of St. James in Santiago’s cathedral. And, going further back, Galicia is the home of Finisterre, the finis terrae, the pre-Columbian end of the earth. In part because of its distant location and in part because of Galicia’s particular socio-political history, Santiago and its region doesn’t just offer museumized Galician culture, but rather a living, thriving lifestyle with deep connections to the past. The preparation and consumption of food (and in particular of the incredibly rich array of seafood that comes out of the Galician bays) is equally ceremonial for the rural peasant as it is for the urban intellectual. In both cases primitive means continue to be used—large cauldrons of boiling

water, dry pine needles smoldering under a grill—and not out of some sense of returning to authenticity in a modern world as it might be the case in the United States (the organic farm movement, for example), but simply because, well, the food prepared in this way is delicious.

I have had more than one young architecture student in New York tell me that for all the effort that goes into the arrangement of actual, physical space in the course of a professional architecture program, the contemporary environment of young people today revolves around the luminous screen of a computer device. If Compostela Architecture has as a goal getting these young architects to engage architecture in a more direct, physical way, what better context for this pedagogy than a culture in which taking pleasure in a meal and a place is a daily habit. By the time students and faculty arrived at Chipperfield’s summer house, they had stopped being mere sightseers and had grown accustomed to their bodies and minds at rest.

Other luminaries make their way through the program in similarly quotidian contexts: Alvaro Siza talked about his architecture inside one of the buildings he has built in Santiago, told us he likes hollow stones, that solid stones are wasteful, and afterwards had lunch with us, showed his wit; Vito Acconci came to the studio to look at student work and then we listened to some music he had brought, and we talked, and later he donned a hard hat like the rest of us and together we all went to see Peter Eisenman’s Cidade da Cultura, a full tour by the project manager, from the completed library to the still exposed structure of the buildings in construction. Countless other visitors take part—medieval scholars, art critics, architects—each with their own Compostela in mind, their campus stellae, which has come to stand for “the field of the star” in folk tradition, even if a careful etymological study would reveal the word’s origin to be elsewhere. Because right along with the program’s goal to bring students to a more direct study of architecture is the faculty’s commitment to admit a diverse range of points of view. And so it was that when the historian and critic William Curtis suggested the Cidade project should be covered up with vines (recalling perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright’s chagrin at the inability of architects to bury their mistakes as doctors can), and I had to respectfully, or perhaps not so respectfully, disagree, it was fine—the food was good and the wine even better.

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Maria Sieira Professor, R.A., LEED A.P. Pratt Institute, New York.

Final Review 2011: Conde Roa, Curras, Curtis, Estevez, Fdz. Prado, Maro単o, Pallasmaa, Rosa.

@CAinstitute Deposito Legal: Edita: Fundación Compostela Arquitectura

Students: 2010 Alfredo Pimentel.

Ana Gonzalez Granja.

Anna Kulik.

Bruno Neto.

Bryan Kistner.

Colin Booth.

Chung Z. Zhao.

Danilo Marini.

Elizabeth Kay. Grant Scott.

Jennifer Caras Kathryn Hovis.

Lauren Fallisi.

Marek Kundrata.

Mario Somonte.

Mark Rego.

Michael Deng Lin. Olga Prokopenko.

Ravie Bath.

Reed Harmon.

Robin Willcox.

Kelly Shaw.

Zachary Briggs.

2011 Adryanne Quenneville.

Bob Burgess.

Camille Milou.

David Deitch.

Filipo Puleo.

Holy Arnold.

Jackie Tugman.

Jin Park.

Laura Schneider.

Levi Tofias.

Michael Del Valle.

Sean Owen.

Tayssir Takieddine.

Timoteo D´Alessandro.

Toan D.B. Nguyen.

Trevor Hughes.

Vladimir Gusev.

Zane Bell.

Director: Carlos Seoane.

Coordinator: Oscar Fuertes.

Faculty: Tatiana Berger, Alberto Foyo, Pablo Gallego, Maria Sieira.

Lecturers: Fernando Agrasar, Felipe Criado, Elias Cueto, José Fernández Salas, Iñaki Leite, Fernando López Alsina, María Lopez Sandez, Carlos Otero, José Otero Pombo, Alfonso Pérez-Méndez, Carlos Quintáns, Edite Rosa, Felix Salinas.

Guest Lecturers: Acconci, Chipperfield, Cohen, Curtis, Pallasmaa, Siza.

Visits: Eisenman, Hejduk, Gallego, Grassi, Grinshaw, Lopez-Cotelo, Miralles, Portela Rossi, Siza.

Photographs by Tono Mejuto

Atelier 2010 - 11