Pocket Space Community Garden | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024 milda.knabikaite.22@ucl.ac.uk

The project is driven by a design methodology which involved viewing the city through the lens of five scales of unconventional metrics. Barcelona was dissected into the key moments of its ongoing urban development, the analysis of which determined a set of Powers of Barcelona (referencing Powers of Ten™ 1977). These unconventional scales offered different strategies of urban place coding and were used as a design framework in architectural space creation. Barcelona’s topography and its famous Cerda’s grid are the leading Powers of the project. By actioning the Powers in a certain order, city grids fold onto the site creating spatial arrangements which are meticulously manipulated to respond to the immediate context of the site. The chosen site is a pocket (open space) community garden, the character of which is improved through methodologically conceived built spaces. Following a conceptual design framework, while staying true to the immediate context and use of the pocket site, the project assembles all the City’s Powers to create a new narrative and perspective on urban gardening that is tailored to both, the programmatic conditions and the intimate residential environment.

Dynamic Square Metre Experiment
1m² frame surveying tool captured urban edge conditions and people’s reactions. Referencing Powers of Ten, the experiment route was action coded into a Power framework of unconventional metrics: Power of Time, People, Frame, City and Distance.

Film fragments
Drawing and model fragments represent the experiment route in a tangible visual form. Real time projection mapping was introduced to calibrate the analogue fragments together.

Final Plans

Assembly of Barcelona’s Powers
Drawing shows how Barcelona’s urban landscape is folded onto the site. The resulting architecture constitutes a knot of the city’s urban fabric and becomes a representation of City’s Urban Powers.

Final Film: Pocket Space Community Garden Building acts as a social instrument in its immediate vicinity joining different groups of people: the Gardener, the Resident and the Staff.