Current doctoral research work at UPM’s Advanced Architectural Design PhD program presents an extraordinarily diverse and apparently contradictory panorama: with technical, historical, philosophical, and artistic approaches, it encompasses from building detail to geographical scale; from theory to criticism, pedagogy, professional practice or social practices; from the confident appeal to the masters, types and elements settled by History, to a visionary fascination for the instability of an unprecedented present and future, driven by media exposure, new technologies, and by climatic, atmospheric, and demographic omens. Everything seems to fit into a program which is exceptional both in terms of its size, with more than a hundred students and more than fifty supervisors, as well as for the breadth of its research field, on occasions difficult to sort among the established categories and structures of academic research.

In this book, the collection of disparate research texts related to the Advanced Architectural Design PhD program performs as a kind of assemblage, a technique inherent to architecture and urbanism. Its editing has involved the identification of affinities among its separate parts as well as their coalescence as a whole. A condensed format is used for the articles written by PhD students, which are instances of the scientific production that is being carried out at the time of this publication. In them, the topics and the hypotheses of ongoing research are exposed. These texts are complemented with additional writings by professors and doctorates who have participated in the program as readers and reviewers of the thesis work.

Considering the life of things, The ETSAB Handbook. An Attempt at an Archive, 2018-2020 maps the activity of the last two years at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).

The current situation imposed by the COVID-19 health emergency makes the pages of this edition not just a testimony to what was the school’s academic life until the summer of 2020, but also a record of a way of teaching architecture that has made Barcelona a leading centre worldwide.

Four sections (teaching, research, international relations, and architecture and community) relate the activity involved in the training of an architect in all its registers and variants, with particular emphasis on the uninterrupted construction in time of a narrative dating from 1817 that serves to trace the evolution of the city of Barcelona.

The edition is complemented by a photographic appendix published here for the first time thanks to recent archival research carried out by the current publications department, and some of the projects that directly affect the development of Barcelona, its metropolitan area and the balance of architecture in the Catalan territory today.

Carolina B. García-Estévez (Barcelona, 1980) is an architect and Doctor of Theory and History of Architecture (UPC, 2012) with the thesis Opus Angelicum. The Architectural Imaginary of the Duineser Elegien, 1912-1922, selected for the Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Award 2014. She is Serra Húnter Professor of History of Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture, and has been visiting scholar at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as lecturing at leading forums specializing in the history of architecture, such as the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Architectural Association (AA) and Kingston College of Arts in London. Curator and archivist for exhibitions at the Picasso Museum (Barcelona, 2020), the ICO Museum (Madrid, 2019), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2008), her research on the relationships between art, architecture and literature have allowed her to rewrite the origin of historical avant-gardes, published in numerous catalogues raisonnés, books and magazines, including Casabella and RA. Journal of Architecture. Her current working thesis addresses the artistic literature surrounding architecture and its circulation and reception in the media, with a particular interest in new archive searches that influence the construction of history.

The 'argument' series includes the results of the annual conference program of the Department of Architectural Design of ETSAM. Each academic year, it proposes a research topic around which all public events of the cycle are developed. SAMPLING CONTEXTS opens this collection with a reflection on the way in which architects incorporate their references in the production process, defining their own context for their practice. The loan of the musical term “sampling” suggests an attitude of appropriation that is openly unprejudiced towards notions of originality and authorship; an effective procedure to tackle the inherent contradictions in the impossibility of novelty. We have been operating in fragments for some time now, but combining them is no longer enough. The construction of shared worlds is a prerequisite for actual production. The individual collection’s raison d’être has changed to that of a collective arsenal. Today, the accumulation of references equates to dreaming up a community.

MAIO, ARQUITECTURA-G, TALLER DE CASQUERÍA, GONZALO DEL VAL, PYO ARQUITECTOS, FAKE INDUSTRIES ARCHITECTURAL AGONISM, ARCHITECTEN DE VYLDER VINCK TAILLIEU, LUÍS ÚRCULO, GUILLERMO SANTOMÁ, BRUTHER, JESÚS VASSALLO, ENRIQUE WALKER & MICHAEL ROCK

This book, in celebration mode, is a chronicle of things that happened in the Programme Without Credits at the Sala de Arte Joven of the Comunidad de Madrid, in its second edition (2017). It is also a choral extension, with many voices, of a shared feeling about the idea of celebrating what we know.

This publication confirms the need for research work to be based on practice and action, where working in community  is more than a sum of individualities. In order to activate  the group-based and shared condition of certain kinds of knowledge that are ideally interesting and disinterested —without credits—we posed the question about what to do by starting with ‘how’, a stimulus, a force or energy. We called it Celebration because we tried to invoke experiences that make the most of art’s potential for play, taking enjoyment and delight in the  astonishing; exploring and experimenting with materials, tools, and ways of naming all this.

This book brings together the material resulting from the planning and development of the Programme Without Credits, a collective research project based on practice and action that sought to activate experimental modes, materials and tools in order to open up artistic communities of learning to the wider society.

Its launch, as a research lab at the Sala de Arte Joven of the Comunidad de Madrid, sparked many different ideas about how to activate an experimental programme which could open up formal artistic education and make it more flexible, particularly at the university level. Through texts and images put together by the Programme’s team, this publication offers new insights into the fertile and ongoing debate on the modes and ways that surround artistic learning, widening its scope to include museums’ public programmes, criticism regarding collaborative art practices, university communities for reading, and the possible policies when working inside/outside the institutions.