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Pere Fuertes & Mariana Palumbo: "An Equation for Sustainability: The Strategy for Habitability"
Publications
Embedded resilience in the built stock. Lessons from socio-spatial interpretation. The case of CanFugarolas (Mataro-Barcelona). by Saez Ujaque, Diego; Fuertes Perez, Pere; Garcia Almirall, Maria Pilar; de Balanzó Joue, Rafael
The concept of resilience remains vague as it pertains to the buildings' scale and the architectural dimension, particularly when dealing with the recovery and reuse of former industrial premises. This study advocates for socio-ecological (bounding-forward) resilience and the use of Panarchy heuristics to analyze the embedded resilience of building stock. This research is based on a case study of CanFugarolas, in Mataró (Barcelona), a former workshop converted into a socio-cultural centre. Here, the building becomes a repository for latent urban dynamism, where spatial transformation is the mechanism by which embedded resilience is released in the form of social dynamism. Adaptive spatial capability (potential) translates into social dynamism (performance) because of socio-spatial interactions. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the spatial and social parallel evolution of the case study reveals that (i) a strong correlation exists between spatial transformation and social participation; (ii) spatio-functional tactics and spatial adaptive capabilities are social and formal complementary mechanisms for spatial appropriation during social progression; (iii) spatial diversification and hierarchization are evidence of spatial specialization, resulting from said socio-spatial interactions. Eventually, (iv) indications of thresholds appear in the form of spatial over-fragmentation and hyper-specialization, denoting spatial exhaustion and embedded resilience limitations.
Publication Date: April 2022
Supplying Barcelona: The Role of Public Market Halls in the Construction of the Urban Food System. by Fuertes, Pere
The origin of Barcelona's food system can be determined at the time when open-air markets were moved to covered spaces. Since then, market halls have adapted to many different scenarios: they have been the built form of public support for food sanitary control, a guarantee of quality and variety of edibles or a tool for the regeneration of urban fabrics. While in the second half of the twentieth-century comparable market systems in other European cities began to decline, half of the thirty-eight active markets at the end of the 2010s were built out of time in the city as a result of a public policy that accompanied urban expansion through the consolidation of small neighborhood centers. With the development of the so-called "Barcelona model" of regeneration of public space in the 1990s, markets became key pieces for urban transformation through food supply systems, a strategy still in force today.
Publication Date: September 2022
Reusing architecture and the need for a change of cultural paradigm
In the European context, addressing sustainability in architecture means considering a consistent urban environment. Thus, most of our efforts to implement sustainable criteria are necessarily related to existing buildings and urban spaces bearing in mind their physical condition and circumstances. 1 We can obviously work towards the improvement of the energetic performance of those structures, but we also need to develop strategies to adapt and reuse them in the most appropriate way. Hence, expanding their lifespan should be regarded as a means to take full advantage of their embodied energy. Such changes though have always occurred. They are part of the nature of architecture itself, but have scarcely been part of Architecture in capital letters. Only in the last decade, an emergent Culture of Reuse is gradually becoming aware of its social significance in terms of responsible development. This intricate scenario leads my research group and me to deal with architecture from 2 the point of view of activity that buildings and urban spaces host or may eventually host and the nature and extent of alterations this state of continuous change implies. Therefore, we need to consider individuals, communities and society along with the built environment as an indivisible whole, taking into account a potential of mutual adaptability, from the domestic to the urban scales.
The Construction of an Urban Food System. Barcelona 1957-2020
Each city has a characteristic food system, so that for each urban form, a specific way of feeding the population can be described. In the words of Susan Parham, “food spaces reflect location responsive spatial qualities which have been developed and expressed over the long term: time-tested design qualities that are argued to contribute to a food related sense of place that can be discern across many times and places”. The specific local response in Barcelona is made up by of multi-scalar system distributed homogeneously throughout the city. The most specific element that makes it up is a set of thirty-eight public food market halls, which are complemented by a private system formed by 1,997 specialty grocery stores and 2,331 supermarkets that provide fresh edibles to citizens. Although percentages show a downward trend, market halls supply forty-four percent of fish and seafood, thirty-four percent of meat, and pork, and twenty-three percent of fruit and vegetables consumed in the urban kitchens. The majority of Barcelonans, accustomed to buying fresh food in the immediate surroundings of their residences, could do so in a market hall.
About Inhabiting: Subjects, Objects and Habitable Space
This paper retrieves the architectural and artistic proposals of the decades after World War II that – according to the main lines of thought of those years – redefine habitable space from the perceptive and emotional factors of the inhabiting subject. The objective is to demonstrate how these productions link their aesthetic and ideological contents with previous works but, at the same time, are consistent with recent proposals as they provide applicable responses to the needs of today's world. The revision of the texts of certain philosophers, as well as the re-reading of essays by architects and artists, constitute the theoretical framework that articulates the sequence of analysed works. Methodologically, the projects and the writings that support them are successively fed back into a path that not only involves the intimacy associated with the interior of the habitable space, but also the social and environmental relations established with the exterior and with nature. This transversal approach to habitability, interlacing different disciplines to address its redefinition, is one of the novelties of the research. The critical review of the positivist and hygienist parameters inherited from the Modern Movement that these works carry out from the logic of a sustainable humanism, along with the verification of the present validity of their statements and their contribution to the improvement of habitability are some of the main conclusions of this study.
Embodied Energy Policies to Reuse Existing Buildings
When dealing with the existing stock of buildings, energy strategies usually focus on the improvement of their performance by means of technical upgrading. However, taking architecture as a resource helps raising another question: to what extent the embodied energy in already built structures could be a key factor to develop sustainable strategies based on an adaptive reuse and a subsequent extension of their lifespan.
Le Corbusier. Streets, promenades, scenes and artefacts
The relationship of Le Corbusier with the street is complex and sometimes contradictory. young Jeanneret seems to be persuaded by certain sites, which we may define as urban scenarios, during his visits to cities like Istanbul in his formative years. Unlike his hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds – identified by a regular set of streets – these places may have been a picturesque coun- terpoint activated by a significant topography. Streets meandering along a set of ‘Dom-ino’ houses in the Oeuvre complete, as the tracking rails of a long shot recording, offer a changing viewpoint that may be considered in relation with such casual arrangements. The claim to kill the ‘rue corridor’ made in Précisions, together with his later writings, deeply contrast with his own comments on an empty Paris in the summer of 1942 – as published in Les Trois Établissements Humains – praising the same streets he pretended to erase by means of operations like the ‘Ilôt Insalubre No 6′. The objective of this paper is to highlight and discuss those contradictions, which can be illustrated by the technical machine-streets conceived for the Ville Contemporaine of 1922 versus the V4 streets formulated in 1947 to reconcile with traditional streets.
Rehabitar en nueve episodios by Xavier Monteys, Pere Fuertes, Magda Mària, Roger Sauquet, Anna Puigjaner, Carles Marcos, Eduard Callís, Carlos Fernández
Rehabitar en nueve episodios reúne los nueve catálogos de los nueve episodios del proyecto rehabitar. Un proyecto que dio lugar a seis exposiciones en la Sala Arquería de los Nuevos Ministerios de Madrid, desde inicios del 2010, hasta finales del 2011. Sus contenidos van del posicionamiento personal de la mudanza, de la casa a la calle, de la esfera privada al espacio público.
Call Number: Oak Street Library, Vaults Request Online
ISBN: 8461600541
Publication Date: 2011
Condicions temporals sobre la transformació en arquitectura by 
Rehabitar en nueve episodios by
Rehabitar en nueve episodios reúne los nueve catálogos de los nueve episodios del proyecto rehabitar. Un proyecto que dio lugar a seis exposiciones en la Sala Arquería de los Nuevos Ministerios de Madrid, desde inicios del 2010, hasta finales del 2011. Sus contenidos van del posicionamiento personal de la mudanza, de la casa a la calle, de la esfera privada al espacio público.
