To embrace, to guide, to bid farewell

A need for a reconnection with the port and a lack of influx and activities in the context of a neglected harbour emerges along Nova Bocana (Barcelona). Through a series of interventions, the aim is to re-establish urban relationships with the harbour, with the focal point being the nautical formation centre located toward the inner part of the dock. The proposal from the Special Port Plan to implement a nautical bus line (the so-called golondrinas, a part of the Barcelona's collective memory of the harbour) is to be integrated into the existing port infrastructure.

The project is in itself a new logic of movements and a re-introduction of the harbour into the city. It lies precisely on the transition point — the reception of inflows. The building thus becomes a living organism: a study on the act of receiving, passing through, retaining determined and indefinite moments, arriving and of departing. It is an incessant flow, abruptly interrupted by an awaiting, but also by a delay, with times different than the usual, because of it’s maritime nature. It is that physical, raw force that governs the hours of docking, the pause, the rest. The idea is not merely limited to a programmatic question, which includes a dock, a small station, and a nautical training center, but also seeks for the architectural language itself to express the notion of guiding, redirecting, and inviting to bid farewell, among other things. In this sense, the footprint of the floor plan, establishes a direct connection between the northern—once part of the dock and now transformed into a wing of the nautical training center—and the southern side, where abandoned warehouses are now converted into small facilities. Thus, the plan and implementation of the building resolve the conception of the project as an urban trace, a movement, and a redirection. Inherent to the plant was the entire project thinking, as it emanated the guidelines of times, spatial behaviors, and movements. However, the great challenge was translating this notion drawn in two dimensions into the elevation. The structure itself supports the idea of guiding, embracing, and bidding farewell. It is conceived as a backbone, with vertebrae marking each step of time, each transition from one program to another, from one moment to the next.