Advisor: Peter Zellner
Partner: Meldia Hacobian

This project was concerned with creating apartments in an area of Barcelona adjacent to the Besos River, an area where the Cerdà grid had not extended out to. The project brief gave the option of extending the existing grid out or refusing to follow the old system entirely. Instead of going with either of those systems, we chose to develop a hybrid. Through analysis of different configurations based on GFA and FAR, we found the most efficient system was a Cerdà Block aggregated into smaller units. This produced a large central courtyard and small sub-courtyards in each of the blocks.

To further develop the massing strategy, we took the existing Cerdà grid and overlapped it on itself introducing a grid shift. Our two overlapping grids formed our initial building concept - resembling a figure 8. Taking into account surrounding site conditions, the mass begins to react to its surroundings (ie. dipping under freeway, lifting over River, etc).