ELENA PALACIOS

My project explores the possibility to create a city as an object.

Nowadays architecture and urbanism work within cities in a separated manner, this segregation has promoted the fragmentation of the cities, were in architecture promotes the development of individual interests and urbanism its collective form.

 As I response I will transform what is traditionally understood as a project of urban planning into an architectural one.

Before, every urban plan was a direct projection of the objectives of the clergy, feudal lord or merchant guild. a series of rules that were synchronized within a context. A citizen in orther to inhabit a city or place integrates into a social structure at a specific moment in time. These organizational structures are given by different hierarchical order, by drawing a street pointing to a specific route or by dictating the position of an individual house in relation with that hierarchical order, an all-inclusive significance.

On the other hand for instance in the Baroque, the city was transformed into a spectacle, the hierarchy was given to "the satisfaction of the eye"  which change the perception of intimacy. Nonetheless, avenues were terminated; this means that by having an orther in relation with power they had an end. The urban system was fully accepted by both the inhabitant and the planner.

With the Industrial Revolution comes a radical transformation. The spontaneous and unprecedented urbanization, by the overflow of the limits of the former city limits. The urban order was changed from having a meaning to an organization derived from an economic cause of its high demographic concentration, the urban complex.  The previous understanding of the structure of an urban system by inhabitants and planners was changed to be something "alien".

The city changes it form from being a system under control, to become a phenomenon by the lack of control.

As cities through time have evolved into highly complex systems, in this part of the thesis I want to open up a series of question, not only due to the delimitation of a space or a limit as a container but also the way the city is organized as an interior, the site itself. How to include within one single space the complex urban scenario in were we now live. How to create continuity without understanding this as a problem of communication and how these spaces can be reconfigured into habitable places.

The relationship between centre and periphery has been a crucial factor in relation to the growth of the cities, and on the way the cities have been planned. Cities are composed by a large variety of places and are divided in a series of groups or communities. For this reason, I consider important to think about the city as an inclusive space, as a variety of different spaces, rather that a homogeneous structure.

For this reason I am using the Olympic program as a single object, to reconfigure its proposal into a purely architectural "subject", to use an existing program that operates at the scale of the city and at the scale of the building, and were its programmatic structure is composed in orther to include as much public space as possible due to the large amount of people that visit this places during the games.

In this point of the thesis I question the way in were all this different activities can be juxtaposed, how to create a rational an logical structure out of such  complex systems.