Formal Analysis of Santa Caterina

This project explored the formal identity of Enric Miralles' Mercat Santa Caterina in Barcelona. With a specific aim at diagrammatic explorations, it sought to divulge the intermingled existence the building has with its own locative lineage, explicitly in relation to the historical themes prevalent throughout its evolution.

Of particular interest was the understanding of the building not as an isolated site of architecture but as piece of history interwoven both with previous instantions of itself in situ and the larger urban framework of Barcelona. In terms both abstract (thematic connections) and literal (overlays of plan, roof pitch profiles et cetera) this lead to an analysis that represented Mercat Santa Caterina as a place of fluctuating experience, from its origins as a Medieval convent through various instantiations of a marketplace to its eventual intervention by Miralles.

Analyses of figure-ground relationships between the various structures commenced the explorations, studying purely in graphic terms the juxtaposition of the various elements that inhabit or have stood on site.

An understanding of the circulatory principles of the site further articulated this understanding, linking its various architectural forms between the organic, packed nature of Medieval European urbanism through to the heavily rational organization of Barcelona crafted by Ildefons Cerdà's 1859 plan for the extension of the city.

To understand the current form of the marketplace is to figure the methods by which Miralles derives his architectural form, be they self-instituted or retrieved from those characteristics already present (or once present). To a great degree, this honed in on the geometric formalization of the open air marketplace's expressive roof, which, it is argued, is arrived to through an abstraction of the original, standard pitch roofs which covered the previous market.

Such allusions to roof structures did not stop at the expression of the roof but can also be found in the literal, palimpsestic impression of the Medieval convent's vaulting on the floors at the rear expanses of the market, which Miralles employs not only in abstract reference to a foregone past but as an orientational mechanism for his exuberant structures erected behind to the aft of the site.

Moreover, this understanding of the building as merely an instance of the site within the larger framework of Barcelona's evolving urbanism can extend to the abstract, infinite quality of the city's grid, which Miralles toys with in skewing the orientations of the market stalls on the project's interior.

The combination of these various elements eventually leverages an understanding of the city, of the site, not as one identifiable entity but as a cacophony of things: an infinite set of moments that permeate between each other to define the uniquely foibled nature of our cities. The interplay between these forms, be they the rationality of structure or the individuality of a roofline, produces an architecture that is intentionally multicolored, as difficult to digest as it is seamless with its context. It invites a reading that is at once foremost in our understanding of the building's unique character and nearly transparent to its background in its subsumption into the history of both its site and surrounding city.