Time catalysts: research by design in the loose ends of Barcelona
type: CreativeWork
description: The passage of time, understood as the duration of becoming in space, offers playful yet serious liberating potentials concerning individual and collective, human and nonhuman rights of appropriation and transformation. This research enquires about the use of time as a design tool in pursuit of such potentials. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks and architectural precedents, it establishes a critical under standing of the capacity of a deep, cross-scalar territory of ever-changing spatial configurations, with openly interpretable supports gathered from specific physical and cultural pre-existence, loosely suggesting delightful habitation over time. The ‘time catalysts’ at the heart of this thesis seek to embody these promises. They set out to deal with urban fringes damaged by the rise and fall of industrialisation, locating the investigation in the southern ‘loose ends’ of Barcelona. In opposition to the widespread tendency towards tabula rasa urbanism, time catalysts are assembled as situated alterations to found contexts. Their slow-changing rhythms are rooted in a fractal field, amidst consecutive infrastructural space (resistance) and its capacity to stimulate successive appropriation (change). They strive for a multiplicity of spatial, political and ecological purposes. In its approach to architectural and urban investigation, this doctorate mobilises its core argument ‘by design’. This methodological pathway bridges practice and theory by using design speculation as a medium of critical and prospective qualitative enquiry. Transdisciplinary relevance is prioritised in this outlook above scientific verification; instead, the uncertain interrelations of explicit and tacit awareness are of primary interest. The design outputs of this investigation distinguish between ‘artefacts’ (situated spatial prototypes) and ‘artifices’ (ambiguous design strategies) - the former containing irreducible yet ineffable knowledge embeddedness, the latter attempting to communicat…
abstract: The passage of time, understood as the duration of becoming in space, offers playful yet serious liberating potentials concerning individual and collective, human and nonhuman rights of appropriation and transformation. This research enquires about the use of time as a design tool in pursuit of such potentials. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks and architectural precedents, it establishes a critical under standing of the capacity of a deep, cross-scalar territory of ever-changing spatial configurations, with openly interpretable supports gathered from specific physical and cultural pre-existence, loosely suggesting delightful habitation over time. The ‘time catalysts’ at the heart of this thesis seek to embody these promises. They set out to deal with urban fringes damaged by the rise and fall of industrialisation, locating the investigation in the southern ‘loose ends’ of Barcelona. In opposition to the widespread tendency towards tabula rasa urbanism, time catalysts are assembled as situated alterations to found contexts. Their slow-changing rhythms are rooted in a fractal field, amidst consecutive infrastructural space (resistance) and its capacity to stimulate successive appropriation (change). They strive for a multiplicity of spatial, political and ecological purposes. In its approach to architectural and urban investigation, this doctorate mobilises its core argument ‘by design’. This methodological pathway bridges practice and theory by using design speculation as a medium of critical and prospective qualitative enquiry. Transdisciplinary relevance is prioritised in this outlook above scientific verification; instead, the uncertain interrelations of explicit and tacit awareness are of primary interest. The design outputs of this investigation distinguish between ‘artefacts’ (situated spatial prototypes) and ‘artifices’ (ambiguous design strategies) - the former containing irreducible yet ineffable knowledge embeddedness, the latter attempting to communicat…
author: Bajet, Pau
keywords: 720 Architecture
date published: 2023-01
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:54:47Z
provider: London Metropolitan University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: London Metropolitan University