Dr Alvaro Cuellar, lecturer at UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, has won the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in the field of Architecture, Urbanism and Building, for his doctoral thesis “El Bosque Habitable. La experiencia de construir ciudad paisaje en Finlandia. (The Habitable Forest. The experience of building a landscape-city in Finland.) 

In his research, Alvaro Cuellar focus on three projects developed in mid-twentieth century Finland, and analyses the rules of urbanism of the modern movement and how it was used to build residential neighbourhoods integrated with the landscape. "It demonstrates the impact of the large scale of the landscape on the urbanism of the country over half a century and discovers implicit tools showing its original project technique. In this sense, the Finnish experience offers an alternative to the current approaches to integrating city and nature," says the lecturer. 

The Extraordinary Doctorate Prizes awarded by the UPC are aimed at PhD holders who have obtained cum laude in the defence of their doctoral thesis. The 11th awards ceremony was held on 8 November in the Auditorium of the Vèrtex Building on the UPC’s North Campus. The lecturer concludes, "The award is a recognition of this research work that has been carried out over more than ten years and which, over the last five years, has been implemented in our Final Degree Projects at UIC Barcelona School of Architecture. With the students we explore design solutions for situations that require a strategic transformation that addresses the landscape, the architectural object and public space as a single entity.