Handbook ETSAB 2018-2020 - VV.AA.

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.