Military Manoeuvres: The recolonization of Barcelona's nineteenth-century barracks...

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona's fourth largest, is unusual in that though founded in 1990, it is based in the centre of the city. Emphasizing its role as part of society, the university has an urban character quite unlike most new campuses which tend to be exiled to the periphery. Installed in a series of remodelled buildings of diverse historical origin, the faculties are clustered around la Ciudadela, near the city zoo and Olympic Village on the eastern edge of the Cerda grid. The conversion of the nineteenth century Roger de Lluria barracks into the university's Law Faculty is the latest architectural project commissioned by Pompeu Fabra's far-sighted and imaginative Rector. Executed by MBM, the city's veteran urbanists, it also forms part of an ongoing process of repair and consolidation that continues to invigorate and sustain the public realm.

Designed by military engineers in 1879, following the guidelines proposed by Cerda, the Roger de Lluria barracks were among the Ensanche district's first blocks to be built. A passage divides the block into a linear volume on one side (housing dwellings) with the barracks on the other side. The barracks form the focus of MBM's conversion. The original building consisted of a I 4m wide perimeter block bisected by a pair of transverse wings to form three narrow internal patios. To adapt it for academic use, the intermediate wings have been removed leaving only the perimeter block enclosing a large central courtyard. The programme specified a range of differently scaled spaces, from a 200 seat lecture theatre and 18 lecture halls seating 120, to numerous smaller seminar rooms, staff offices and a student refectory.

This complex architectural nougat is elegantly and efficiently accommodated within the remodelled barracks. The main moves are simple yet effective -- the courtyard is sealed with a glass roof supported by a steel space frame, and two new blocks, one housing the lecture halls and the other staff offices, are slotted along the long edges of the new internal space. Enclosed on the courtyard side by a delicately shimmering curtain wall of frameless glass, the lecture hall block is the most obviously dramatic of the two new interventions, resembling a giant fishtank constantly enlivened by the colourful comings and goings of shoals of students. The lowest level contains the 200-seat lecture theatre and the refectory, so diners can spill out into the courtyard. A series of catwalks on the non-courtyard side connect the lecture halls with the rest of the building. Standing in the courtyard or walking around its arcaded edges, there is a voyeuristic pleasure to be derived from surveying the animation and activity. T he cloistered, inward-looking business of study becomes, in effect, a public spectacle, and the great glass fishtank provides a clear sense of orientation for students, staff and visitors alike as they move around the building.

On the opposite eastern side of the courtyard, running parallel with the classroom prism, is a slim, linear volume containing the monkish cells of the staff offices. Clad in horizontal strips of scaffolding timber, it forms a subtle counterpoint to the transparency and lightness of the lecture hall block. Pleated sections of white aluminium protrude from the visor-like windows giving privacy and reflecting natural light. In fact, the staff block was a late addition to the programme, reflected in its rustic construction and slightly intrusive nature. Yet like an accretion of buildings of different eras clustered around a plaza, the contrasting blocks give the courtyard a sense of urban dynamism and visual diversity. The fabric of the original building is still clearly discernible, forming a robust armature for the new parts. From the street outside, the spruced up nineteenth-century facade of the hermetic perimeter block gives little clue to the drama of the internal transformation. The courtyard lies one floo r below street level, so from the main entrance on the east corner you arrive at a perimeter arcade, with views of the lecture halls and staff block, connected by stairs and ramps to the subterranean courtyard. If the courtyard is the set-piece plaza, then the network of arcades, internal streets and corridors that run around its edge offer a different kind of urban and spatial experience: intimate, small scale, humane, with the socially-enriching potential for chance meetings and informal interaction.

Appropriately, this inventively handled and executed project is a microcosmic reflection of Barcelona's and Spain's wider political and social transformation. The expulsion of the army from Spain's inner cities by Catalan interior minister Narcis Serra (Barcelona's first post-Franco mayor who initiated the city's seminal programme of urban regeneration) was not only an act of political liberation, it also offered the opportunity to recolonize buildings formerly given over to the repressive apparatus of the state. In an ironic but entirely admirable role reversal, a military barracks is now a place of learning, infused with openness, freedom and transparency. Swords into ploughshares, indeed. At the centre of the courtyard, a memorial commemorates the hundreds of academics in Catalan universities who suffered under the former regime. Underpinning this Pauline conversion is MBM's quietly dignified architecture, a transforming force that sensitively recasts the relics of history and the nuances of place for a ne w political age.