Studio MA2 (Cierto)

A house is a city

We understand housing not as an isolated object but as a continuum extending from the city to the dwelling. The quality of everyday life depends as much on the home itself as on the collective and transitional spaces that connect it to the street. Housing blocks therefore have the opportunity - and even the responsibility - to improve their surroundings and foster community. We are particularly interested in those intermediate spaces - porches, passages, courtyards, entrance halls, galleries and walkways - that belong simultaneously to the house and to the city. They accompany residents home while enriching the public realm, turning the journey from street to dwelling into a gradual transition between public and private. As Aldo van Eyck famously wrote, "A city is a house; a house is a city."

The studio takes place in Fira Montjuïc, one of Barcelona's most emblematic yet contradictory urban sites. Originally built for the 1929 International Exposition, the exhibition grounds have remained largely unchanged for almost a century. What was conceived as a temporary installation became a permanent enclave: a vast fairground inserted between two consolidated neighborhood that today remain physically disconnected despite being only a few hundred meters apart.

The exhibition halls, each the size of an Eixample block, operate only intermittently—intensely occupied during events and largely empty for the rest of the year. There are almost no residents, little vegetation and very limited everyday urban life. In a city facing an acute housing shortage, this mono-functional enclave invites a broader question: how can an existing urban enclave become part of the everyday city?

The studio explores this question through the adaptive reuse of the exhibition halls as collective housing. Rather than treating the existing buildings as constraints, the project understands them as an extraordinary reserve of built resources, capable of accommodating new forms of domestic life while reconnecting the surrounding neighborhood.

Developed in pairs, the project unfolds through a sequence of architectural questions rather than through the design of a complete building from the outset. It is constructed progressively, moving from the city towards the dwelling - through collective space, the domestic threshold, the housing typology and its aggregation - before returning once again to the city. Each exercise builds upon the previous one while remaining open to transformation as the project evolves.

. Reading the Existing (2 weeks)

Study trip to Barcelona

Reading the urban context and existing pavilions

Redrawing as an analytical tool

Understanding structure, dimensions and construction logic

Building a shared understanding of the site

. Imagining the Collective (2 weeks)

Designing the collective realm

Sequence from street to home

Collective spaces as places of encounter

Degrees of privacy

Courtyards, galleries, staircases and shared circulation

. The Domestic Threshold (1 week)

Designing the inhabited threshold

Between collective life and domestic intimacy

Threshold as a place rather than a line

Model as a design tool

. Housing Typology (2 weeks)

Entering the dwelling

Flexible and adaptable rooms

Multiple scenarios of occupation

Distribution diagrams

Housing as part of a larger spatial continuum

. Aggregation (3 weeks)

From the dwelling to the building

Bringing together collective spaces, thresholds and housing

Aggregation in plan and section

Flexible systems and changing households

Satellite rooms and reversible growth

Building as an evolving domestic system

. Where the House Meets the City (2 weeks)

Returning to the urban scale

Ground floor as a porous threshold

Facades as the expression of collective life

Relationship between public space and domestic space

Reconnecting the pavilion with its surroundings

Section and model as design tools

The final review presents the project as the synthesis of a single architectural investigation developed throughout the semester. Rather than a collection of independent exercises, the project is understood as a continuous process in which each successive design decision has informed, challenged and transformed the previous ones.

Students will revisit and refine every stage of the project - from the collective spaces to the domestic threshold, from the housing typology to its aggregation, and from the building to its relationship with the city - demonstrating the coherence of the proposal across all scales.

Alongside the updated project, each pair will produce a complete axonometric drawing of the transformed pavilion and a final image capable of conveying the relationship between domestic life, collective space and the existing structure, revealing how the memory of the exhibition hall becomes inseparable from its new life as housing. The final review presents not the sum of six exercises, but the synthesis of a single architectural investigation progressively developed throughout the semester.