13th November 2014
Evening Lectures
Barcelona 5.0.The Self-Sufficient City outlines a blueprint for the city to come, a city built around cities and their renewed capabilities to become productive again, based on the principles of local self-sufficiency and global connectivity. Thus, we want to build a city on a human scale, in which it empowers citizens. Barcelona has defined a vision for the next 40 years to transform in a metropolis of neighbourhoods.
Vicente Guallart is the Chief Architect of Barcelona City Council with the responsibility of developing the strategic vision of the transformation of the city and its major development projects. Previously he founded the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) where he was director 2001-2011. His professional office, Guallart Architects has developed projects in many countries. He is the author of books like Geologic and Self-Sufficient City. His work has been exhibited at the Biennale of Venezia, MOMA or AIA in Washington.
Vincente Guallart will be signing copies of his book ‘The Self-Sufficient City’ (for £25, rrp: £16.50) at the launch for this book on the evening of 11/11 after his lecture in the south Jury room.
The internet has changed our lives but it has not yet changed our cities. Any technological revolution takes paired radical transformations in the life styles. If the age of the car and the oil shaped the cities of the 20th century, the society of the information will form those of the 21st century. It is an unstoppable evolution that, nevertheless, it is necessary to be able to lead with criterion. It is a question of taking advantage of the urban experiences accumulated for centuries by the human beings and having present that the growth cannot be unlimited and the energetic resources that our planet offers have expiry date. Vicente Guallart exposes this fascinating process in a book loaded with ideas, information and proposals. As observer, thinker and pioneer of the architecture of the future, Guallart proposes the regeneration of the cities (from the housing to the metropolis) to stimulate a new economy of the urban innovation. A path with destined to the self-sufficiency local resources, and to the global connectivity as knowledge and information. Because the connected self-sufficiency get the cities and the persons who inhabit them been stronger, free and independent.
