Barcelona Bike Tour

            Taking an architectural tour of a city is a very interesting experience.  Being able to experience a building at the moving speed of a bicycle creates different perspectives at a fast pace, allowing for a basic but important understanding of the building’s presence in the city. It also allows for one to quickly be able to recognize the buildings most important element because of the short amount of time that one spends observing and analyzing the building.

            As an assignment we were asked to draw buildings in a series of vignettes that use three lines, five lines, and eight lines. This forced us to draw what we thought was the most important element of the buildings. The buildings that I felt I analyzed best were the second and third buildings we drew.

            The second building we drew was a tall vertical building that stands alone. When approaching it from the street, one realizes that its profile is violently pierced by an extremely horizontal building in the foreground. I then chose to express the tall buildings face. It is covered by angled strip louvers that are seen from top to bottom. This gives the building a very bright and impressive feel.

            The third drawing we did was of a group of three buildings. The three buildings include one taller building in between two shorter buildings.  I felt that the most important elements of these buildings were their edges. Their edges violently collided with each other creating a very interesting perspective.

Library Perspective

Drawing the library in the Eixample was a very important part of understanding the experiential aspect of the building.  The building connects itself to the courtyard in a very interesting way.  The library’s rear façade is broken into two towers with a connecting bridge.  From the courtyard this element creates a kind of gateway marking the entrance and exit to the interior of the Cerda block.

When entering the courtyard the ground floor extends to wrap around the public space. Its façade is clad with an offset screen of steel. This creates a type of hallway along the side of the building.

There is also an overhang that creates a shelter in rain and a place to observe the courtyard from the edge.

Drawing this space allowed me to really break down the space and think about how it works. The perspective shows how the building towers over the space and dominates the focus of the area. The feeling of a gateway that the building creates makes the space seem like a safer more isolated area rather than simply a space that exists because of a lack of building.