Paintstrokes of Catalonia | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024
charmaine.tang.19@ucl.ac.uk
Situated on Montjuic Hill in Barcelona, a site embodied with Catalan history, this project celebrates Catalonia’s cultural heritage and artistic tradition through painting as a design process for architecture. Montjuic Hill, once a place where revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War were imprisoned, executed, and buried, stands as a poignant symbol of the region’s struggle for independence and its subjugation to Republican forces.
Inspired by contemporary Catalan politics, nationalism, and the Modernisme movement, the project proposes an art restoration museum dedicated to preserving and memorialise artworks lost during the Spanish Civil War.
Modernisme, a cultural and artistic movement that played a pivotal role in asserting Catalan identity and expressing the region’s strive for independence, is central to the project’s design philosophy. To capture Modernisme’s adventurous spirit that is seen as emphatically Catalan, the project explores an architecture designed from paintings. This serves as a model to how paintings can be three dimensionalised and realised into architecture, as a way to memorialise what was lost.
Painting as a design process
Paintings are three dimensionalised through displacement maps. This is explored at different scales: excavation, massing, building and furniture.
Painted plan is translated into a massing model of the building. The layers of colour diffusion is interpreted as hierarchy of wall layers with different materials, floor finishes or furniture.
Museum Interior / Art Restoration Workshop
Final Film
Glimpses of painting emerging from the architecture