Search

Alejandro Zohn (1930-2000) studied both at the same time civil engineering and architecture in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. From his student times he became interested in the plastic and formal qualities of ruled structures and concrete. This is evidenced by his final works and his engineering thesis "Nuevo Mercado Libertad” in the San Juan de Dios neighbourhood, in 1955. A couple of years later, the thesis became one of the main buildings in the city. This design project will determine his personal path in architecture: using the hyperbolic paraboloid, a ruled surface that solves not only the roof but the entire building, obtaining spaces of great interior and exterior expressive richness, which are halfway between architecture and sculpture. Added to this is the use of a reduced range of traditional materials in conjunction with industrial materials. This article explores the origin of this way of designing and unfolds the compositional mechanisms that the architect-engineer uses in his design projects. Starting from a basic unit that, singularly or systematically repeated, solves a wide range of architectural typologies, Zohn creates a set of masterful works that have spatial qualities in accordance with the specificity of the place, with the properties of the materials and with the programe requirements.

Barcelona has a large number of apartment buildings built throughout the twentieth century, whose sizes exceed the current needs and possibilities of its inhabitants. The new variants in lifestyles, combined with housing high prices, require other sizes and forms of organization. The transformation of existing typologies to respond to current demand would facilitate intelligent reuse of the Modern housing heritage of the city. In the Modern Movement there were formulated, typological proposals of housing with satellite segregated rooms that made possible the adaptation to the variable needs that covered social requirements beyond the traditional family nucleus, incorporating spaces to rent, to welcome a relative or set up an office. This paper proposes rescuing design project strategies, based on these lessons that architectural modernity offered on minimal housing—with shared spaces and equipped independent rooms—and applies them to built-in housing stock by Catalan architect Francesc Mitjans in Barcelona. The objective is to establish criteria for channeling the adaptation of these buildings for their reuse, preserving the organizational, spatial and material values of their architecture, and ensure that the existing typologies do not fall into obsolescence, are not transformed and segregated without criteria and speculatively, as it is beginning to happen in Barcelona, and that residential use is not expelled from the city centre.