Mention: Time catalysts: research by design in the loose ends of Barcelona

82 mention Pau Bajet Time Catalysts: Research by Design in the Loose Ends of Barcelona Time Catalysts: Research by Design in the Loose Ends of Barcelona Author Pau Bajet Supervisors Florian Beigel (LondonMet) and Philip Christou (LondonMet) Co-Supervisor Matthew Barac (LondonMet) and Pere Joan Ravetllat (UPC) University London Metropolitan University (UK) Jury members Sara de Giles (ETSA Sevilla), Kelly Shan non (KU Leuven) and Peter St. John (LondonMet). Viva examination chaired by Nicholas Temple (LondonMet). Published in a 1935 report of the Port of Barcelona building committee, this ‘sketch’ plan (croquis) depicts a chronology of the port’s developments over centuries.1 On the left (north) side, overlaid dotted lines describe a kilometre of progressive shoreline reclamation between the 15th and 18th centuries where the popular quarter of Barceloneta would later be built. This immense land extension appeared accidentally as a consequence of the arduous task of constructing a dike that would preserve a navigable body of sea water—the city’s new port—safeguarding it from sand barriers persistently formed and reformed by the prevailing north to south sea current. This was a slow endeavour, gradually advancing and 1 Junta de Obras del Puerto de Barcelona, Memoria (Barcelona: Industrias C. Cornet, 1935), 50. Drawing by P. Ribas. 1. Detail of P. Ribas, ‘Croquis B: Reseña histórica del Puerto de Barcelona desde su origen hasta la actualidad’, 1935. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 83 2. P. Ribas, ‘Croquis B: Reseña histórica del Puerto de Barcelona desde su origen hasta la actualidad’, 1935. Source: Junta de Obras del Puerto de Barcelona, Memoria (Barcelona: Industrias C. Cornet, 1935) failing over more than two hundred years. Unwittingly or not, the artifice of the dike in its design to conceal the port combined with meteorological dynamics and patterns of sedimentation, including increased alluvial deposits from the Besòs river—both naturally and anthropically produced—to support the formation of a new plateau onto which the city would later expand. In other words, the dike functioned as a catalyst in the slow generation of a new human and nonhuman landscape. It may be seen, retrospectively, as an instrument that made use of a long passage of time to stimulate urban transformation. This thesis sets out to ask: might such instigatory, catalytic, evolutionary triggers for manifold civic development be deliberately designed? My decision to start the thesis with this drawing is apposite for several reasons: because the sketch plan illustrates the potential of progressively urban transformation over time; because as a representation, the drawing succeeds in depicting an accumulation of intervals and changing situations; because I enjoy its combination of sharp precision and loose ambiguity; because the drawing is not oriented according to a universal rule or grid (cardinal directions) but organised from the inside-out, facing the sea from the city—as we inhabitants do—while coinciding with the Roman geometrical layout of the urbs traced more than two thousand years ago; and, perhaps most importantly, because by introducing the promise of time through this drawing, I reveal a key factor in the attitude or stance adopted in my thesis: a form of knowing through phenomena that I can directly experience in my everyday life—a life lived as an architect in Barcelona, near Montjuïc, culturally and physically embedded in the site of this research project. The thesis summary is organized in order to address a threefold purpose: thematically it aims to formulate a deeper understanding about treating time as a design tool in spatial practice; methodologically it investigates an approach to architectural research that deploys design speculation as a vehicle of enquiry; and in ethical and practical terms, it cares for the elaboration of specific outputs—in the form of situated urban prototypes and design strategies—that serve to explore the thesis topic and procedures, while at the same time emerging as outcomes on their own terms. That is to say, they come into being as distinctive civic artefacts, embodying and yet transcending the origin of their monographic investigation. Finally, the introduction concludes with an explanatory note that explains the layout of the thesis and guidance regarding its navigation by the reader. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 84 Time as a Design Tool How may we understand and appropriately exploit the potential of time in spatial practice? This study investigates the use of time as a design tool through a cohort of interwoven projects that explore a threshold in scale and in practice between architecture and urbanism, aiming to carefully transform pre-existing, fragile urban environments. Building upon an awareness of the immense tradition of the study of time in the humanities, this topic is approached through specific philosophical frameworks. From that angle, the passage of time performs liberating and affective potentials of individual and collective rights of appropriation and transformation.1 Particular ecological and political awareness trigger playful yet serious practices of change, caring for manifold human and nonhuman contexts.2 This approach to change is phenomenologically situated, therefore reclaiming the resistance of mundane rhythms rooted in ordinary places and, in this way, taking delight in slow durations of progressive transformation.3 Besides philosophical context, an array of selected architectural precedents and cri1 Lefebvre, Perspective or Prospective, in Writings on Cities. 2 Morton, Being Ecological, 186. 3 Barac, “Place Resists: Grounding African Urban Order in an Age of Global Change,” Social Dynamics, 24-42. tique establish the grounds for discussion in the lead-in chapters of the thesis. This literature review starts by portraying the freedom of spatial appropriation on an everyday basis, not being enhanced by harmless neutrality, but by physical and cultural specificity, yet remaining indeterminate and openly interpretable.4 Then, amid post-war paradigms of the open form and participation, a wide reading of Habraken’s approaches unfolds—beyond objectual buildings—a deep territory of live configurations, with generative supports and interpersonal capacity for 4 Beigel and Christou, “Brikettfabrik Witznitz: specific indeterminacy – designing for uncertainty,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 18-38. habitation and transformation over time.5 Following the design concept of ‘landscape infrastructure’ developed by Florian Beigel and Philip Christou since the 1990s, these live configurations (or infrastructural levels) are suggested to be gathered from situat ed traces of specific material and cultural contexts, engaging with found pre-existence, to loosely suggest future habitational delight, at any scale from landscape to furniture.6 In dialogue with all this literature, the thesis 5 Habraken, Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing. Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary. Form and Control in the Built Environment. 6 Beigel and Christou, “Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Slid, Berlin,” arq: Architechtural Research Quarterly, 204. 3. Erik Friberger, Däckhuset housing project in Göteborg (1959). Source: DigitaltMuseum, from the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 85 identifies gaps for research speculation in-between scales and typical situations, concerned with a wide notion of habitation beyond programmatic and typological reductions, while bringing current poetic, tectonic, political and ecological concerns. Thematically, the thesis posits the following research question: what sort of architectural procedures may foster the design of cross-scalar spatial catalysts for delightful appropriation and transformation over time? In line with a sensibility expressed above, the thesis is concerned with—and intends to enjoy—mundane situations and wicked problems of our ordinary civic environments. In particular, it cares for damaged urban fringes that have suffered the rise and fall of urbanisation and industrialisation in the borderlands of civic cores, the often unravelling or neglected ‘loose ends’ of the city. In this regard, an initial working hypothesis suggested that the notion of ‘time catalysts’ may embody the potential of spatial stimulants of joyful change. But these time catalysts could not depart from decontextualized tabula rasa or isolated laboratory experiments. Instead, they should only be gathered as architectural or urban enhancements and additions to a found topography, already rich in physical and cultural terms, taking advantage of their unique situated contexts. Moreover, according to this hypothesis, the architectural configuration of time catalysts departs from an understanding of a fractal field of ambivalences between permanence and change— amidst consecutive infrastructural spaces and their capacity to stimulate successive appropriation at multiple scales—incorporating not only spatial qualities from autonomous architectural parameters (even if these too), but embracing diverging purposes and meaning from transdisciplinary concerns. While learning from literature and precedents, as well as by delving into the investigation of specific designs in the ‘loose ends’ of Barcelona, I was surprised to realise how naturally these localised concerns easily expand into multi4. ARU, Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Süd, Berlin.Three collage drawings on tracing paper, by Peter Beard, ARU. (4.1) Existing trees in the landscape. (4.2) Proposed landscape infrastructure, establishing field structure. (4.3) Early stages of field settlement. Source: Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, Translations (Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Swiss Architecture Museum, 2014), p.13. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 86 5. Marie-José Van Hee, Tentative loose sketch of House Van Hee. (2019). Source: Courtesly of Marie-José Van Hee. faceted matters, thus enriching their architectural ground and stimulating unexpected tectonic turns at multiple scales. Before introducing the design products of this investigation, outlining their purposes, scope and character, the next section aims to address ‘how’ this research is undertaken. Design as a Research Vehicle This thesis navigates the methodological terrain of architectural research which, one might argue, is at times swampy or at least murky, freighted in some quarters by controversy and sometimes by dispute. The design-led approach adopted is relatively familiar in Anglo-Saxon and Northern European universities—even if still a young and comparatively uncertain method at a doctorate level, as I discuss in the third chapter—and yet a methodological pathway to architectural research that remains largely unseen in institutions with a deep tradition of doctoral study (including the Polytechnic Universities of my homeland). This approach to architectural investigation asks: why shouldn’t architects rely on their own praxis as a core instrument of doctoral investigation? Why can’t the process of design speculation be embedded as pivotal to critical and prospective qualitative enquiry? These questions point to the potential of a speculative area of architectural research, an angle concerned with insecure, or better said ‘designerly’ ways of knowing.7 This angle prioritises relevance above verification, enquiring uncertain interrelations of explicit and tacit, even ineffable, forms of connoisseurship.8 This methodological journey at7 Archer, “Design as a Discipline,” Design Studies, 17-20. 8 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, 92. tempts to bridge architectural practice and theory, bringing together ‘the intuition of making’ with the critical distance of ‘proper thinking’—a traumatic disjunction related to the split between artistic and scientific spheres in the 18th century. 9 For a long time, architectural research has departed from analysis, interpretation and theorisa9 Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, 324. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 87 jects at varying scales, enjoying vivid situations, while sustain ing a deep dialogue with literature, architectural precedents and everyday observation. In terms of methodology, my contribution intends to articulate this sensibility in dialogue with a scholarly context of research through design, by proposing a particular methodological structure and output. Methodologically, this PhD asks: what is the role of designing and its production—projects or artefacts—as a pivotal vehicle of a doctoral investigation in architecture? What is the interaction between design tion of physical or cultural phenomena fixated in the past, establishing a safe critical distance with its objects of study. Undoubtedly, this remains a sound and fruitful pathway to architectural knowledge that I do not intend to undermine. Nonetheless, my suggestion is that a procedure that uses design speculation as a research vehicle, may offer an additional stratum, further enriching and expanding a wider field of architectural research. Later in the thesis we will outline a philosophical and scholarly context for this epistemological pathway, establishing conditions and purposes for the role of design in the context of doctoral investigation. In addition, given my initial unacquaintance with this type of research—and looking for methodological stability—over the course of the thesis, I have mapped out an array of PhD programmes around the globe that have forged the first steps of this approach in the past 30 years. This contextualisation has been published elsewhere in a condensed format, yet not included in this thesis to avoid an excess of methodological materials.10 Within this research territory, the thesis follows a phenomenological sensibility, one that embraces the act of designing as a medium for research, enjoying its depth, uncertainty and ambiguities. The hermeneutical principle of knowledge production and reflection from within the context of experience and creativity is here brought into being in an architectural premise. This sensitivity is deeply influenced by ARU (Architectural Research Unit) at London Metropolitan University, a design laboratory that for decades has used ‘design as research’ as a method of enquiry.11 Their investigations—even if rarely at a doctoral level—have focused on spatial and design concepts, explored as monographic enquiries, tested and unfolded through live pro10 Pau Bajet, “PhD: Grasping Knowledge Through Design Speculation,” IX Workshop on educational innovation in architecture: JIDA’21, 424-437. 11 Beigel and Christou, Translations, 7. 6. Early exploration of design strategies as artifices (2016) 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 88 speculation and standard academic procedures? What should be the structure of this kind of doctorate and its balance between literature, background material, and core ‘by design’ content: between words and drawings? What sort of forms may embody the apprehensions gathered from the process of designing, in order to make them communicable for others? This research journey has not been easy. From the beginning it has encountered a thorny contradiction between the necessity to formulate monographic enquiries—as in any doctoral research—and the expansive, manifold and transdisciplinary nature of designing specific, situated architectural and urban projects. In the thesis, I argue that from this inherent difficulty and contradiction, distinct (perhaps rather relevant than verifiable) and unexpected findings have arisen. During the early steps of the doctorate, in a conversation sustained with Florian Beigel, Philip Christou and Peter Carl, a methodological hypothesis took form: it departed from a differentiation between ‘artefact’ and ‘artifice’, the former understood as the output of personal design speculations (carrying ineffable knowledge in itself) and the latter as a necessary subsequent intent to propose explicit and communicable—even if ambiguous—formulations that could embody design strategies or concepts learned from the projects. These artifices should not be confused with abstract principles unrooted from the material world to be automatically generalised elsewhere. On the contrary, approached by means of designerly ways of knowing, the artifices implied the necessity of practical skill and intention from designers to be subjectively interpreted in anticipation of the future.12 Artifices cannot be read by themselves, but only interpreted by designers in relation to their personal dexterity and experiences, as well as in relation to the specific projects that suggested them in the first place. My hypothesis was that these artifices would result in a family of nuanced visual-written design strategies embodying insights compiled during the design journey. Situated Urban Prototypes and Strategies The central and final chapters of the thesis are devoted to situated design speculations developed on my own as the core vehicle for this study. The site for the research project is in the Barcelona southern loose ends, behind the hill of Montjuïc near the sea, in a former agricultural terrain now absorbed by decayed early industrial developments and wasteland, all seemingly besieged by 12 Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice, 59. vast metropolitan infrastructures including the main port of the city. This place is approached at different scales, starting with a city edge landscape project, continuing with an urban grain transformation, and concluding with smaller-scale city interior proposals, always with the intention of gathering cross-scalar design strategies. It is important to make clear that both my subjective 7. Beach of Can Tunis portrayed as leisure destination in Destino magazine, article by Paco Candel (1958). Source: Destino, No. 1096 (9 august 1958). 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 89 recollection of contextual data (containing biological, geological, climatic, historical and economic, among many other concerns), as well as the urban and architectural proposals (entailing environmental, thermodynamic, sociological, services and structural specialities) have been approached at an individual scale, based on information obtained between 2015 and 2020 from public sources, with the purpose of establishing a vivid context for a modest yet meaningful doctoral investigation. Therefore, its specific urban analyses and proposals cannot be taken as comprehensive developments, that in professional practice would have required broader interdisciplinary team effortsBy exploring the concept of time catalysts through design speculation and, therefore, enjoying vivid situations anchored to this specific place, the thesis produces a cohort of projects that carry on their monographic investigation—maintaining a dialogue with historical and modernist precedents as captured in the literature cited—and, still, they go beyond in offering fresh urban and architectural propositions, with singular qualities of their own, responding to grounded social, ecologic and poetic matters. This situated exploration addresses design-speculative research in a two-step process. Firstly, design appears as a method of interpretation for seeing and constructing subjective places, through selecting and sketching fragmentary situations of potential. Investigated at different and sometimes overlapping scales, this operation unveils unexpected qualities from marine and agricultural memories, industrialist infrastructures, accidental streetscapes and yards, a haphazard plot division, and a prosaic city grain of sheds and rowhouses. These interpretations make apparent fragile physical and cultural topographies that already suggest directions of future change. Appearing 8. Plan of the Llobregat Delta over centuries, indicating agricultural and urbanised land. First drawing 1st to 10th c. Second drawing 11th to 20th c. Third drawing 21st c. 9. Yards and alleys as found spatial infrastructure (2017). 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 90 as instigators of upcoming appropriation and transformation, these spatial situations are identified as ‘found-time catalysts.’ In a second step, design appears as a vehicle for wider speculation, launching and testing the potential of time into novel spatial form. In the research, this process takes place through a constellation of projects at varying spatial, social and temporal scales, by enhancing the previously found situations and, at the same time, by creatively releasing ‘new-time catalysts’ in distinct, fresh forms. ● At a larger scale, a human-made geological shoreline is proposed as a socio-ecological threshold that connects Montjuïc and the delta, while catalysing horticulture, leisure, workspace, living and collective memory, as well as improving the water cycle, biodiversity and microclimatology. ● At an intermediate scale, an accidental street structure is proposed, by gradually altering ordinary found urban situations. This proposal radically opposes a tabula rasa approach, in this way enjoying and carefully distorting historical differences, while avoiding local displacement. ● At a smaller scale, a cohort of projects explores the potential of shared urban supports to house a changing, non-pro10. View of a generative wetland of the Estany de Port. 11. Study of new water streams and wetlands (2021). 12. Enhanced city edge aerial view. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025 97 Bibliography (from this summary only) Archer, Bruce. “Design as a Discipline,” Design Studies, 1:1 (1979), 17-20. Bajet, Pau. “PhD: Grasping Knowledge Through Design Speculation,” IX Workshop on edu cational innovation in architecture: JIDA’21, ed. Daniel García-Escudero and Berta Bardí Milà. Barcelona: GILDA, 2021: 424-437. Barac, Matthew. “Place Resists: Grounding African Urban Order in an Age of Global Change,” Social Dynamics, 37: 1 (2011), 24-42. Beigel, Florian and Philip Christou. “Brikettfabrik Witznitz: specific indeterminacy – designing for uncertainty,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 2 (1996), 18-38. Beigel, Florian and Philip Christou, “Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Slid, Berlin,” arq: Architechtural Research Quarterly, 3 (1999), p. 204. Beigel, Florian and Philip Christou, Translations. Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag and Swiss Architecture Museum, 2014. Junta de Obras del Puerto de Barcelona, Memoria. Barcelona: Industrias C. Cornet, 1935. Habraken, N. John. Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing, ed. Jonathan Teicher. UK: Urban International Press, 1972; repr. 2011. Originally published in 1961 under the Dutch title, Dragers en de Mensen, het einde van de massawoningbouw. Habraken, N. John. The Structure of the Ordinary. Form and Control in the Built Environment Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective,” in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 171-174. Originally published in 1968 under the French title “Perspective ou Prospective?” in Lefebvre’s book, Le droit à la ville. Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological, London: Pelican Books, 2018. OECD, Frascati Manual 2015: Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and Experimental Development, The Measurement of Scientific, Technological and Innovation Activities. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2015. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983. Rykwert, Joseph. The Necessity of Artifice. London: Academy Editions, 1982. Note: except stated otherwise, drawings and images have been produced by the author. 12-2025 www.dur.upc.edu The Fifth Manuel de Solà-Morales European Prize 2025