Textures of Memories

This workshop was an exchanged semester in Barcelona for the studens from Sharjah. The course was divided in two parts: practising the personal reading and analysis of a places, specially “Casa Mercaders”, and designing a project for the industrial complex of “Can Ricart” in Poblenou.

In the first submission was required a booklet to bring back the students’ inspiration from the site in which now live and work, and the first impression about the experience of visiting Barcelona, the EMBT architecture studio, the Enric Miralles Foundation, the EMBT project “Santa Caterina Market” and the EMBT project “Casa Mercaders”. Students should explore a possible re-interpretation using the existing context, its history, and architecture.

On the second part the students received a detailed lecture about the EMBT’s project for “Can Ricart”.
The basic idea to start with is the most preservation and revitalization of the industrial complex in competition, a valuable architectonic heritage, by introducing a new intervention in the same way industrial architecture has always done. This intervention takes place in a space which has already been inhabited, which has been used as a working space for more than 150 years and which has a memory that we would like to transfer. The aim of the project was to enhance the quality of the public spaces that the industrial complex has already had.