The public space and applied BIM
From the disciplinary knowledge of more than 150 years of design models related with the modern history of public space and after 39 years of academic experience on present day issues related to landscape, the studio investigates free space, through a contemporary prism that goes beyond urban design typologies, in order to incorporate global notions and strategies about its essence.
The studio deepens in new visions starting from the point of view of landscape, ecology or art to the development of the project up to a professional level that considers detail construction as an expressive virtue.
The studio’s objective, which focuses results from the perspective of the public use, as an inevitable starting point, is to deal not only with urban projects but also with sites in the peripheries, with the sea and fluvial shores, to reinvent landscapes or to influence infrastructure projects.
Studio work pursues tools for an efficient academic response to the issues set around free space through practice supported by a contrasted body of theory, as well as design presentations or that of exemplar propositive attitudes and technical knowledge and research on new disciplinary fields.
The proposed exercises, can be design of urban strategies, unoccupied sites, the beach and coastline, membranes in between landscape units, highways, itineraries, terrain-vagues, or in general, places of “opportunity” to design. All the above focused from an interdisciplinary and transversal point of view and developed at the corresponding scales.
Related theoretical subjects: History of Landscape Ecology, Gardening Techniques, Sociology, Construction and Services.
Studio A1 (Public space I)
8 ECTS, 53 teaching hours
First studio of the module Public space. Is held over six weeks, with classes Tuesday and Wednesday from 15:30 hs. to 20:30 hs.
The workshop will proposed a project on not-built spaces whether inside or on the outskirts of the contemporary city. We will work on three topics, such as cultural references, design elements and analysis of existing spaces.
Studio A2 (Public space II)
8 ECTS, 53 teaching hours
Second studio of the module Public space. Is held over six weeks, with classes Thursday and Friday from 15:30 hs. to 20:30 hs.
This second part of the studio will focus on the change of scale and approach from the analysis strategy at scale 1:5000 going down to the world of the constructive details up to scale 1:20.
Training course (BIM applied to public space)
3 ECTS, 24 teaching hours
Training course: BIM applied to Public space. Is held over six weeks, with classes on Fridays from 15:30 hs. to 20:30 hs. Each student will develop a complete exercise, working in a guided way on modeling, data management and the visualization of project information from the BIM model.
Objectives
Studio A1 (Public space and applied BIM I)
– Acknowledge and analyze different kinds of public spaces within the city, from a contemporary approach.
– Train skills to recognize urban green infrastructure systems and to apply design strategies in order to improve and change the traditional urban model.
– Acknowledge urban ecology criteria, modern urbanism, and social values.
Studio A2 (Public space and applied BIM II)
– Approach and define the concept “Urban Project”.
– Acquire meaning and definition criteria of specific details in the Urban Project.
– Understand and implement techniques, materials, and selection of elements that compose the urban contemporary landscape.
– Learn from interdisciplinary team woks and rely on individual professionals from different fields.
– Explore the market in order to find the specific products that match the project objectives.
Training course (BIM applied to public space)
– Provide the landscaper with the necessary resources to develop their professional activity in an increasingly digitized world, using the BIM modelling tools of the Autodesk Revit software, and applying their possibilities within the framework of contemporary urban space design.
– Expand the look at some more experimental and disruptive uses of the tool, applying parametric modelling to the landscape project and allowing its use to be adapted within the framework of environments and scales as diverse as urban planning and strategy, the design of wasted public spaces, the coastlines and other places of opportunity in the context of the contemporary metropolis.
– Initiate the student in the BIM rules in terms of standards and collaboration, which constitute one of the fundamental assumptions when interacting with BIM professionals from the rest of the discipline
With the evening glow
The conceivable equilibrium between daily work and evening rest has been broken, the Man, on its titanic struggle to break the seal of an established millennial cycle, has extended the day.
If the night becomes an extended opportunity for working, for leisure, the evening has become the inevitable space.
The city grows out of its industrious character; a Factory, a warehouse, an office, a marketplace, all of them becoming theaters, monuments, fashion shows, promenades where we all stroll, as well as our visitors. Forums, Factories, warehouses, offices, shops, hotel bars, parking, all centrifuge around the city. Diasporas that emerge during the day through their trivial architecture; anonymous, vacuous, banal, out of context, disproportionate and in some cases even illiterate and ignorant. Emergency landscapes. Badly dressed, amiss made-up, and poorly hidden.
However, all cats are grey in the dark. During the night, everything seems to be on a different disposal, a new make-up for our eyes vision. From the subtlety of a lit-up graphic to the parsimony of the street lamp rhythm, the illuminated landscape confers a more precise order and a suggestive chaos.
From top views: hearts, arteries, and veins are revealed, just like an x-ray. Something hardly perceivable during daytime. Trails disclosed sites ranked, faraway places linked together. The light defines the boundaries of a vivid territory and it qualifies it. The precision that the day has never known, the limit where urban finds the rural. The night is also exaggerated with human fluctuations; landscapes get deserted or saturated. In an era where leisure occupies more and more plots of our time, the night, is a key topic, an opportunity to transform or modify the reality that surrounds us.
We will work on the night landscape. How to underline it, how to rank it, how to find its own laws, a tool that can build landscapes.
A field for a time that devours its own technology, a time that expires its own forecast. It is a field consubstantial to the observation of landscape and architecture and from a diametrically opposed nature.
Daniel Freixes
translated by: Sebastian Montenegro
Public Space workshop, 1997
Qualitative (*competences) and quantitative (ECTS credits) analysis:
*According to the EBANELAS ECLAS competences frame
At the Biennale 
Open call to submit projects to Rosa Barba Casanovas International 