BAC · Boletín Académico. Journal of research and contemporary architecture
BAC Boletín Académico Revista de Investigación y Arquitectura Contemporánea is the scientific journal of the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the University of A Coruña. It is published in Open Journal System (OJS) format, on an annual basis, and follows the double-blind peer review procedure. Each issue contains research articles, interviews, architectural critiques and reviews of publications, without a specific theme, as long as they are original and unpublished contributions and are related to architecture.
The intellectual property of the articles belongs to the authors and the edition and publishing rights to the journal. The published articles can be freely used with education and scientific purposes providing that proper reference is included. Any commercial use is strictly punished according to the law
Looking back for signs of other ways of doing can become a support for reactionary and nostalgic wills. Therefore, the objectuality of the term "field" has to be complemented with a becoming other, the primordial quality of the landscape where all potential relationship is still possible, giving back to reality a constructive hermeneutic. Likewise, it is no less true that the imperative need to reimagine the world and our relationship with it must attend to the gestures that have so far shaped it. In its decentralized globality, we are invited to navigate diverse latitudes in search of other ways of integrating the recognition of the random continuity of the world in order to imagine and reimagine other architectures and landscapes. From France, with a young Michel Serres, to the Island of Teshima and Ryue Nishizawa's Museum of Art, some considerations are proposed to reformulate the relationship of the "field" with contemporary practice.
Copyright (c) 2024 Boletín Académico. Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea
The care in colonizing the landscape: The Floating University of Berlin
The colonization of the rehabilitated landscape of the Floating University of Berlin was initiated by the Raumlabor collective in 2018 for the creation and experimentation of a social space. They engage in the care and repair of a water collector infrastructure and propose dismountable objects to produce a habitat and well-being derived from qualitative interaction with the environment, not only as a mere social necessity but by adding programs from interconnected diversity and individuality. The old models of land use are challenged and replaced by new hybrid systems where there is a flexible agreement between the city and nature. The project of the Floating University of Berlin utilizes tools that express the fleeting manifestation of diversity to imagine and create new forms of life. They open the door to the enormous possibilities of a new planning and land management approach based on care, moving away from the opposition between countryside and city to achieve a new social value.
Antonio Fernández Alba. Shaping an oasis in the middle of the desert
In its simplest definition, the landscape of the desert epitomizes emptiness and vastness, qualities that stand in contrast to those inherent in human nature. The workers settlement at Zorita Nuclear Power Plant, located in the middle of the desert region of the Alcarria, provides insights into the endeavor of providing temporary housing for a small group of residents within the expansive desert. This essay delves into the perspective of Madrid-based architect Antonio Fernández Alba, examining the strategies employed in this project from a professional standpoint. Abandoned and uninhabited since 2006, the settlement is devised to establish a livable space within such a challenging landscape. One of the key strategies involves the creatin of a kind of oasis that contrast both socially and climatically with the nature environment of the desert.
Designing the landscape of the huerta of Alicante through speculative design and affirmative cartographies
The article presents the huerta of Alicante, a traditional irrigated landscape on the verge of disappearance, and a practice-based research with the project ‘Camins de l'Aigua’. In this landscape architecture project, we have used graphic and narrative tools to reconstruct an imaginary that makes the task of water management desirable again, but in different ways. We explain how we have avoided the dangers of nostalgia associated with the promotion of heritage landscapes by using the theories of feminist scholars Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, namely speculative fabulation and affirmative cartographies. The former helped us to improve the technique of narratives of the more-than-human we encountered in the field. The latter has helped us to activate the critical potential of the landscape even in a tourism and cultural promotion context, while maintaining an affirmative ethic.
Una arquitectura del perímetro. Cinco historias del espacio público en Sevilla. Pedro Mena Vega
Copyright (c) 2024 Miguel Rabán Mondéjar
Fotografía y arquitectura. La imagen del espacio construido. Iñaki Bergara
Copyright (c) 2023 Antonio Santiago Río Vázquez
A journey through the beginnings of the productive industrialization of natural resources around the dynamics of food conservation through collective heritage at the sea limit of the Atlantic peninsular arc.
Copyright (c) 2023 David García-Louzao Araujo
From Voom Voom to The Chemical Brothers:
In the midst of the effervescence of psychedelic art in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of staging projects were relevant for their ability to generate new non-linear spaces in which the viewer would become a “temporary builder of the experience and master of his own enjoyment”. Thus, a set of projects in which interactive spaces coexisted with all kinds of inflatable structures will be studied; this will be joined by music and melodies that would allow the users to immerse themselves in a kind of hallucinatory ‘journey’, similar to psychotropic experiences. What was intended with these playful-festive environments was not so much to comfort the viewer, but to show these strategies as a new field for environmental games, experimentation in all its senses and the exploration of a new and unexpected perceptive reality through the superposition of multiple stimuli.
This article addresses the need to contemplate the spatial nature of the urban phenomenon: what characterizes the urban phenomenon from the perspective of spatial delineation? What distinguishes urban planning from architecture in spatial terms? Can we establish bridges, points of contact, or equivalences between urban space and architectural space? This reflection does not intend to exhaust itself in an academic and self-absorbed rhetoric. Rather, it aims to establish the foundation for a fundamental and well-founded thinking that restores the architect to a leading role in the conception of the urban phenomenon. Today, cities and territories face numerous and challenging issues, where it is common and necessary for urban planning to draw upon other areas of knowledge. However, one must not forget the inseparable spatial nature of the urban phenomenon.
Copyright (c) 2023 Oscar Linares de la Torre
In search of the breaker zone —epiphanies of hosting— a conversation with Francesco Careri
Editorial BAc Boletín Académico, volume 13 (2023)
Copyright (c) 2023 BAC Boletín Académico. Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea
Editorial BAc Boletín Académico, volumen 12 (2022)
Review: Escenas de la América desértica, Reyner Banham (2021)
Copyright (c) 2022 David Hernández Falagán
Darwin viene a la ciudad. La evolución de las especies urbanas
Review: Darwin viene a la ciudad. La evolución de las especies urbanas, Menno Schilthuizen (2020)
On behaviour and emotion: graphic approaches for architectural evaluation
Sustainable design requires methods to evaluate the architectural space under the user-centred design approach. Advances in computational thinking have brought tools such as spatial syntax or visual tracking technologies that assess relational, social and cultural aspects of the built environment, but also emotional and perceptual aspects of the spatial cognition process. The relational and topological connections display the functional organization of the space, while the collection of quantitative biometric data provides assessments of the user experience. Highly useful information on architectural design, particularly in the analysis of informal architecture or vernacular architecture, informal settlements or landscape architecture.
Copyright (c) 2022 Ángel J. Fernández-Álvarez, Vicente López-Chao
Active vs. Passive: The Architecture of the Four Modes
This article aims to establish a new register of architectures based on their way of managing the climate in order to relocate the climatic management of the space and the role of its inhabitant as a fundamental material of the architectural design. In a line that follows Lisa Heschong's research on building’s thermal qualities, passing through Eva Horn's views on the loss of relationship with the climate, to finally complement the climate management modes proposed by Reyner Banham. Examples of the four modes are developed in their raw condition: Retardant, Hermetic, Selective and Regenerative; separating them conceptually to incorporate them as architectural material in a necessarily combined way. And thus re-establish an active relationship between habitable experiences and the richness of climatic variations.
Copyright (c) 2022 Amadeu Santacana Juncosa, Pol Mensa Biosca
The virtual universe where we move more and more daily activities, apparently delocalised by the global processes of digitalisation, paradoxically requires a physical infrastructure that generates a high regional impact by consuming large amounts of energy, resources and territory. This article questions whether data centres, the industrial architectural paradigm of ICT, favour new socio-technical assemblages with their associated environment around recycling and energy use processes in a recursive relationship that expands the traditional semantics of architectural regionalism.
Copyright (c) 2022 Joaquin Perailes Santiago, Aitor Frías Sánchez
Improvised Guidelines for Urban Construction taking Darwin into account or how nature comes to town, a conversation with Menno Schilthuizen
Interview with Menno Schilthuizen, author of the book Darwin viene a la ciudad.
Copyright (c) 2021 Francisco Leiva Ivorra
Copyright (c) 2021 BAc Boletín Académico. Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea
Editorial BAc Boletín Académico, volume 11 (2021)
Review: Louisiana. Architecture and Landscape, Michael Sheridan (2017)
Copyright (c) 2021 Carmen Garcia Sanchez
Arquitectura en tiempo presente. Lo moderno incluye lo contemporáneo
Review: Arquitectura en tiempo presente. Lo moderno incluye lo contemporáneo, Fabrizio Toppetti (2019)
Copyright (c) 2021 Javier Navarro de Pablos, Francisco Gómez Díaz
Copyright (c) 2021 Fco. Javier López Rivera, Ramón Pico Valimaña
The architectural cultural crisis in the digital environment: a pending question
From their widespread utilisation in architectural design at the beginning of the 90s, digital tools have provide it with undeniable benefits, among which the ones derived from their excellent capacity of managing information and their ability to produce new geometrical developments, stand out. However, concurrently to these improvements, they have emphasised the cultural crisis the discipline is suffering from the second half or the past century. The inclusion of the previously accumulated architecture knowledge is specially complex in the case of algorithm-based, self-generated architectural designs processes. The aim of the present article is to propose the use of the manifesto, understood as a clearly structured and brief propositional text, as cultural vehicle suitable for calculus based architectural design processes. To achieve that, it is necessary first to understand and narrow down the genre, dissecting it later, so that its elemental parts would enrich the parametric variety that feeds the algorithmic connections of the digital architectural design.
Copyright (c) 2021 Beatriz Villanueva Cajide, Francisco Javier Casas Cobo