On 4 September, UIC Barcelona’s Aula Magma hosted the inauguration ceremony of the Vertical Workshop which, including this year’s edition, is now the 22nd edition of the workshop.  The director of UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, Josep Lluis i Ginovart, gave the opening address to the participating students and highlighted that “even after twenty years since the School’s foundation, the Vertical Workshop continues to promote the same values of modernity, humanism and internationalisation in the teaching of architecture”. 

Entitled “The Rec Comtal in Vallbona”, from 4 to 13 September, students in second to fifth year of the Bachelor’s degree in Architecture will split into teams to jointly design and build a prototype of urban furniture aimed at enhancing the remains of the Rec Comtal canal in the Barcelona district of Vallbona. 

This new edition of the Vertical Workshop is coordinated by the architect and lecturer at UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, Íñigo Ugalde, and is also co-managed by the architects Carles Enrich and Andrés Lupiáñez. Both architects have worked actively on restoring the Rec Comtal in recent years. Indeed, Carles Enrich is the author of the Strategic Plan to restore this infrastructure, commissioned by Barcelona City Council in 2015. Andrés Lupiáñez is co-author of an earlier study on the restoration of the canal where it passes through Vallbona. 

On 13 September, the structures created by the students will be erected and installed on-site in the section of the Rec Comtal at Vallbona so they can be assessed by a jury from prestigious architecture firms H Arquitectes and Peris+Toral. The results of the assessment will be made known on the afternoon of 13 September in the Casal de Barri in Vallbona where the students’ own “making of” videos will be shown.