Year Coordinator : Suzanne Ewing
Lead Tutor: Victoria Clare Bernie

Cádiz: field+work 2006-8 took as its point of departure the city of Cádiz on the Atlantic coast of southern Europe. The Bahia de Cádiz, comprising the ancient city of Cádiz on the isthmus and the four ‘mainland’ towns, is a metropolitan area perched on a bay, a protected wetland of unique scientific interest. The definition of ‘urban’ for Cádiz and its satellites is a contentious play of water, marsh and solid ground. Cádiz was a centre for the Phoenician salt trade, a Roman and a Moorish settlement and a key gateway for the Americas during the age of ‘Discovery’. The city has a significant history of trade and military engagement and is characterised by an architecture of coexistence: the ancient fragment, and the modern intervention. As part of the porous coast of southern Spain, the city is subject to sanctioned and unsanctioned immigration and issues of water politics, trade and the decline of traditional industry. The city of Cádiz is a remarkable resource for a study of the condition of urban development in Southern Europe, transculturalism and the politics of fragile ecologies.

Using ‘field’ – the architectural site and its perceived limits – and ‘work’ – site, studio, workshop, desk-based and interdisciplinary investigations - the Cádiz: field+work programme sought to address a potential for architecture beyond the built object. For architecture as a self-consciously situated practice; as “the irrigation of territories with potential.” [Rem Koolhaas, Whatever happened to Urbanism? `SMXL (1995)]

Using individual and group practice, choreographed and responsive teaching programmes, the Cádiz: field+work studio undertook a series of designed and self-directed projects relating to the city and its possible futures:

Individual interdisciplinary research in the domains of: hydrology, immigration law, seismology, pharmacology, shipping, politics and history.

Group practices directed towards urban policy, ‘masterplanning,’ and future citymaking.

In Semester 2 and 4, the collective studio sought to address the plan and then the fiction of a future Cádiz through the design and realization of a Cádiz Planning Office ‘City Plan’ [installed performance] and a Cádiz ‘City Model’ [installed model] as a collective address to the temporal and spatial limitations of the conventional masterplan.

Student projects for the city of Cádiz included:

‘Landscapes of Production’: a scaled Biotechnology Research and Development Centre spanning the Bahia de Cádiz from small scale sponge processing in the wetlands to the east to pharmacological production in the former dry docks of the city of Cádiz.

‘A Hydropolitical Strand’: a programmatic seam of cisterns, pipes, water therapy centres, Regional Water Board Offices and urban dams intended to make visible the operations of civic policy with regard to the collection, treatment and distribution of water.

‘Reprogramming the Ruptured City’: a new commercial centre for Cádiz predicated on a seismic study of the landscapes of the Bahia de Cádiz region and a close working of the established and possible industries of a future Cádiz.

In August 2008, selected projects from the Cádiz programme were exhibited as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The exhibition Saltcity was accompanied by the publication of a book of the same name and a symposium on the subject of future citymaking in Southern Europe.

Visiting critics to the Cádiz: field+work studio included: Ben Nicholson, Andrew Benjamin, Iñaki Abalos, Sarah Wigglesworth and Mathew Barac.