The “Shop Til You Drop” aims to create a new experience in the old town of Gibraltar, seeking to engage visitors by luring them in with the world of shopping. By designing a unique space that combines the architectural character of the heritage city with that of the modern aspiration of commercialization, it seeks to rebuild the characteristic of the street to bring in economic revenue and urban growth ... Read more

This project deals with the past, present, and future theatricality of the Bay of Gibraltar, in relation to the settlements around its edge – Gibraltar, La Linea, Algeciras – and across the strait to Morocco. These landscapes are read as both backdrop and auditorium; the ports are re-contextualised as the wings and aisles, and the Bay is the stage. The project first establishes comparisons between historical events that have occurred in the Bay alongside other theatrical experiments by artists, architects, and landscapes designers, based on visual and structural similarities. These include both grand events - military sieges, ostentatious construction contributions, as well as the everyday theatricality of fishing-trips, dolphin-tours, migrant patrols, and global trade. It compares the legislation that dictates movement across the Bay to the laws which dictate movement around a stage. The theatrical reading elevates these events as somehow equivalent and worthy of attention, disturbs pre-existing understandings, and recognizes the Bay as a unique theatrical setting. Three sub categories – staging, scripting, viewing – demonstrate precise modes of comparison, each corresponding to a set of spatial conditions, architectural operations, and design objectives. They also coincide to a range of materials, introducing comparisons between drawings and cartographies, scripts and instructions, photography and etchings. By definition the designer of a stage does not limit the acts that can or should take place on it, thus, this contribution is not about designing a play but rather defining the stage. Going beyond the conventional theater space, this contribution introduces a new scale and form of theatrical setting-the global. Theatrum Mundi, or the world as a stage, and in particular, the Bay as a Stage. The theatrical reading is undertaken in order to literally and figuratively draw attention away from the contentious Rock, relegating it to the status of backdrop, and move focus towards the neutral and shared Bay, elevating it to the status of stage. Historically the Rock has been the focus of the theater, in emotional, political, and scenographical terms, with a vocabulary that emphasizes its separation, security, and isolation. Discourse within Gibraltar tends likewise towards isolation and introversion, typified by their antagonistic relationship to the water and their preoccupation with the Rock. By shifting the focus from the Rock towards the Bay, and by providing a new vocabulary for how we speak about the shared Bay the contribution invites regional scale collaborations and initiatives by clarifying and reinforcing the theatricality of the Bay itself. ... Read more

Spirituality in Gibraltar follows its own local logic. Around the base of the rock, in the dense town and port, cultures mix and intersect and negotiate in streets and buildings. Churches, mosques and synagogues, religions have found places – sometimes highly traditional senses in their symbolism, sometimes not. These communities reach a balance and form the dynamics of the peninsula. The compression reinforces the difference of certain beliefs, a fierce shared sense of coexistence as well as a multi-faith and Gibraltarian identity. Currently, they share a cemetery located at the junction of the airport and the city center, not just creating a religious blending atmosphere, but also being under the pressure coming from invasive city expansion. Above the settlement, they make designs in, on and around the Rock. Technologies, structures, and spaces from different centuries have erected a Vibrant vein of the Rock, as if the Rock is evolving by itself. From prehistoric burial chambers undergoing hi-tech archaeological research to world-war tunnels reinvented as tourist destinations, from man-size caves to large tunnels enabling transportations to pass through, incursions into the Rock such as abandonment, reinforcement, renovation and extension are made according to available technology for the rituals and requirements of the day. Developed trajectories of both tunnels and religions are similar, they can reflect and compensate each other, allowing both contradiction and similarities co-exist simultaneously. This project takes the phased relocation of Gibraltar’s multi-faith cemetery from its hard-to-survive site on flat ground and prime real estate adjacent to the airport, to a steeply sloping, east-facing site of defunct “Water Catchment” that are barren lands nowadays as the basis both for reassessing spirituality in, on and of the rock, and for reinventing the ways in which spaces are made in, on, and of it. The shared funeral system with introduced ecological methods continuously change the life forms and textures of the Rock with the help of vegetations as new tombs, which is slow in process but full of energies, making a comparison with the high-speed developing urban environment.Life does not end but continues in another way. ... Read more

Healthcare has been often described as the most complex human organization ever devised.
The life of hospitals has been supplanted many times by an aseptic compliance with norms, regulations, procedures, protocols, and hyper technologies. Hence, there is no longer any trace of the old sacred enclosures, the Greek temples, the Roman valetudinaria, hospices, of the home of the sick, or cathedrals and abbeys equipped to host people in need. The hospital as an inflexible monument of civic pride was to remain until the second half of the twentieth century.
We often perceive the hospital as a place adorned with hard light, bare corridors, with no personal or interesting features. As Mukherjee wrote in The Emperor of All Maladies, “Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it.” Hence, to describe the future of healthcare is necessary to understand the forces shaping it.
Aging and growing populations, greater prevalence of chronic diseases, and exponential advances in innovative—but costly—digital technologies are the developments that continue to increase demand and expenditure. The future of healthcare is also much less centered around institutions; it is rapidly becoming decentralized, dematerialized, demonetized, and, ultimately, democratized. As healthcare becomes more data-driven, it is also becoming more personalized.
This is the story of families moving to Gibraltar. This is the story of a new hospital—the ultimate housing for births, souls, hopes, and dignity. This project proposes Gibraltar as a healthcare destination. In the tradition of Swiss mountain open-air sanatoria, it has a strategic location, boasting effective local healthcare legislation, economic incentives, and continued infrastructural development between southern Europe and youthful north Africa. It is isolated from chaotic cities, with a positive climate (300 days of sunshine a year), green slopes, sea views, fresh air, and quieter streets.
Gibraltar is the perfect set because of the current and forecasted importance of healthcare in its economy. Based on Gibraltar's budget between 2017 and 2019, a forecast envisions a growing expenditure in the healthcare field. The forecast demographic increase suggests almost 30% of the new population will be composed of children under 18.
In the peaceful ambience of the mighty Rock, only a short walking distance from the Royal Naval Hospital, a block of sheltered housing with primary health facilities (emergency, occupational therapy, and imaging departments) aspires to renovate, making the transition from home to hospital imperceptible. By all measures, in fact, the home is the future of healthcare.
Specifically, the proposal focuses on the design of a long-term residential paediatric centre, targeting young patients and families who normally travel far from their homes to specialized hospitals. Hence, the design for Gibraltar's 2050 hospital envisions the city-state as a place for treatment, healing, and recovery, strengthening the economy by serving the population expansion and strengthening Gibraltar’s position as an attractive and pleasant place to live.
Architecturally, the bottom-up complex provides an experiential journey from medical processes and foyers, common spaces, and a public healing garden (the Rock itself), to rest, healing, and independence. The new social and architectural melting-pot attempts to combine the notions of domesticity and hospitality in a secluded area on the Rock.
In summation, this social-architectural project aims to reach a point of privacy and dignity, especially through its small, human scale. Families and residents of all ages and origins can enjoy much-needed breathing space, and carry on their normal and dignified lives.
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This project deals with the industrial heritage of Gibraltar and its future prospects in the context of the global economy and the local culture. More particularly, it is about an upgrade of a ship repair yard known as Gibdock. It is aiming to counterbalance the issue between the ecological and Gibraltar’s economy, improving a better quality of the local environment to Gibraltar, and while providing efficiency and convenience as if a pit stop, to make a profit on the global stage of the maritime industry.It is strategically located in the western Mediterranean but cannot accommodate the majority of current container ships due to its limited size of dry-docks. Historically, Gibraltar has been fortified for many centuries, and human activities happened both on land and on ocean—Gibdock used to be a British naval dock (S, M and L size) for repairing and docking battleships, and has dominated Gibraltar’s economy with the naval dockyard providing the bulk of economic activity until 1984— this, however, has changed after then, and these undersized docks impeded Gibdock to catch up on new demands in ship repairs and refits currently.The upgrade strategy critically considers new international marine regulations, anticipating standard sizes, operations quantity, type of repairs for the next decades. It finalizes what kind of refits to ships need to complete, in order to comply to new rules. This anticipation of design is based on a wide range of sizes in relation to container ships, machine operations, spare parts, and considers how this design can turn the side effect of heavy industry in positive way. As a consequence, a new piece of infrastructure modernizes these S, M, and L docks while a new wet-dock in front of the existing docks enables Gibdock to modify XL boats. The service Gibdock provides is part of a larger marine business strategy called the ‘’one-stop-shop”. By offering all the services in one place —Gibraltar can gain a competitive advantage over Ports which only offer one or two of these services. This modification of ships at Gibdock is another service alongside those that Gibraltar already provides: refueling& underwater cleaning (at North mole), loading & unloading (at container berth), crewing & de-crewing, mooring (at Quayside), repairing and refitting (at Gibdock). ... Read more

The project collects past, present, and future stories of energy in, around, and through Gibraltar: fuel economies in the age of Franco; the refueling of middle eastern tankers; the transition from diesel to LNG fuel sources; the additional load of bedroom bit-coin miners, to industrial scale server farms; the interception of fuel tankers bound of middle eastern war zones; the design of new power stations; the laying of new power cables between Europe and north Africa; new forms of decentralized energy sources and the impact of energy migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The stories speak both of the internal and local logics of Gibraltar, and of its role within international networks: the alliances, arrangements, and compromises it makes to ‘keep the power switched on’ and remain a feasible territory; the economical and infrastructural side-effects of energy networks that pass around and through the straits and the peninsula. The project describes how these networks manifest themselves in infrastructure, buildings, and spaces: cables, landing stations, and maintenance rooms; docks, re-fueling stations, and dormitories; LNG trading routes, power stations, control rooms; data networks, underground storage tunnels, bedrooms. It does so in order to tell new stories about Gibraltar; not as a provincial cul-de-sac out of time, but as a node and a conduit in one of the key Geo-strategic locations in the Mediterranean.  This is a location of increasing importance in the decades of climate emergency, as Europe turns towards north Africa for new sources of energy, as climate migrants line the Mediterranean coastline, as shipping and trade transforms. ... Read more

The project deals with the architecture of hospitality. More specifically, it is an investigation of how architecture is used to provide a background to civil society and induce meanings through spatial and structural constructs whose realization is based on exchange value. In the transient territory of Gibraltar, where current and future construction boom run the risk of encouraging local authorities to dispose of land and property assets to real estate developers, the project takes the form of a hotel, with its ability to provide the means through which the relationship between public and private space is negotiated, while capitalizing on the capacity to produce different formats of social encounter. Hence, the modus operandi of this contribution within the grand scheme of things is twofold; The hotel comes in as a point of convergence whose sole purpose is based on continuous movement of people and capital, facilitating the predicted boom of the tourist industry and the increasing influx of people into the territory. More importantly, however, it presents itself as a private commercial venture offering an alternative ground for social and political participation in a privatized city.
It is the political charge of the hotel that this project uses as a means to articulate the civic potential of this particular building type. By introducing politics as a set of activities that take place on the spectrum between public and private, the Inn Gibraltar challenges the hotel as an architectural artifact—with its programmatic, formal, and spatial presence—and its capacity to engender a register of meaning in its own right. To politicize a hotel then means to openly question its importance, not only as a city-forming element, but also as a relevant cultural edifice. To explicate what is often only implicit is to shed light on the forces that shape and will continue to shape not only Gibraltar's, but our urban condition at large. As such the project's main intent is an interrogation of a particular form of hospitality in order to comment on the transfer of responsibility from agencies as different as the state or the family to the corporation.
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"Culinary Cultures" understands the dietary story of Gibraltar, as well as the way in which it incorporates relevant change. A new food culture is developed from production to consumption across the peninsula and over time, gradually alleviating Gibraltar’s culinary life. "Culinary Cultures" introduces a change in the familiar setting of the Public Market, highlighting particularities that it already offers, aiming to smoothly imbue the shift in the local culture. Making people aware becomes then a strategy to shrink the current ratio of obesity and overweight residents that affects three out of five Gibraltarians. The purge of the current “effortless” street food culture should be an invitation for participation, resulting in an understanding of what we should consume and how. Gibraltar’s expected population doubles by 2050 and becomes even more diverse in terms of the nationalities living in the territory. As a result, its survival depends on the maintenance of its differences, and even its further differentiation. Incorporating new dietary habits and dining settings of people from northern Africa and east Asia becomes the new challenge. Within the scenario of the local food production around this infertile land, architecture in relation to food has the chance to alter its current consequential condition. Food and dining should not take place in generic spaces that happen to be there, but in spaces created to host them and enhance a coherent food culture across the territory. The ritual of eating in "A Gibraltar in the Making" is an integral part of the coastline and even the sea, materializing in a multilayered scenario from production to consumption. The “Vessel Food” becomes a symbolic place to dine with friends, where the production and preparation of food takes place in a performative manner in front of consumers. In a contemporary urbanized society like Gibraltar, cooking provides one chance most people have of taking some control over what they eat. Cooking is not just about what goes on in the kitchen, it is a pivotal point in the food chain—the one that arguably affects everything else in it. Cooking, like talking and writing, requires education— and like these essential skills, it comes easily once you know how. ... Read more

The contribution explores the new agenda of architectural means in contemporary context. Today, in the era of Post-truth, when all the information we learn circulates with uncertainty and doubtful truth, all these online knowledges we perceive are like rumors. As architects, we develop techniques to simulate architectural design throughout history and the advancement has eroded our idea of built and not-built nowadays. When the influence of architectural means is not limited in its own profession in this Post-truth era. Can we, architects, interfere people’s understanding of a place by deliberately creating or exaggerating certain aspect of a something, in this case, the Chinatown of Gibraltar. Across Europe there’re anxiety about motives, underhand tactics, and cultural transformations. The image of Gibraltar – which remains vague, mysterious, exotic in most minds – is thus ideal to generate rumors. The spatial influence of the new type of Chinatown interfered in smaller scales, on personal level. Across the world, the Chinese investment today are not only on Chinese stuffs, they also produce authentic products. To design an effective architectural rumor, the method is analogy to the ordinary way of designing architecture. The design brief, the objective of all the Chinatown rumors, is to suggest the Chinatown in Gibraltar either directly or implicitly, the site and program are chosen on media where we learn about Gibraltar, and the reference can increase reliability of the rumors. The Chinatown rumor disseminated in Europe might be on websites and stories about Brexit and cultural transformation to increase exposure. The Chinatown rumor disseminated in Gibraltar might be on local forums with exclusive stories. The same method can apply to various websites with different stories, identities to affect different audience. The reaction of the rumors embodies new agenda of architectural means. ... Read more

This project explores the realities of production in the Irish landscape, and speculates upon certain industries that maintain both a rural economy and Ireland’s architectural identity. The essence of this project as the name suggest, is to combine two residual industries in Ireland, farming and the pharmaceutical industry into one new synthetic architectural type, The Farmacy. These Farmacies, house a pharmaceutical production facility within the traditional scale of the smallholding or farm, while using the authentic spatial model of the Irish monastery. It provides an alternative to the existing fragmented pharmaceutical production landscape. In its density, scale, repeatability and seriality it continues to define an architecture of rural Ireland, while they also give a much-needed identity to an economically important emerging industry. ... Read more

This project deals with the architecture of order. It is at its core an exploration of how design is used to provide a powerful and coherent image of the state through the representation of the most fundamental and controversial of institutions: police.
The police station is interpreted here as the center of a system of state representation, the place where civilians, officers, detainees and solicitors converge, positioning n at the intersection of state order and architectural order.
The project focuses on the Garda Siochana, the sole police force in the Republic of Ireland. In the context of the Project Ireland 2040 the Irish government plans to increase the Garda presence over the country, focusing specifically on rural areas. The plan includes the refurbishment, expansion and construction of more than 30 Garda stations. A policeman, in this rural context, is a common fixture, a part of the local landscape, the butt of a popular joke. Not a semi-divine representation of the state, nor a troubled urban detective, a policeman is here part of the local society together with the postman, the butcher, the pub owner. It is this specific condition that allows for a reconsideration of police architecture not as one defined by the idea of control, or even intimidation, but one characterized fundamentally by reassurance.
This reality opens the possibility for rethinking the role of police on the Irish territory, proposing an architectural language embedded in the rural irish context, consisting of an encounter between the classical order and elements of the local vernacular.
This critical reconsideration projected outwards by the facade of the police station and the moments of exchange it enacts, and inwards, through the design of interrelating spaces that underpin the practice of policing.
“The police are the public and the public are the police” is stated in the Peelian principles, the founding document of Irish police. It is the adherence to this principle that leads to a design for police that is not based on grandiose architectural gestures, but on a careful reconsideration of the relationship between the vernacular and the classic, the relatable and the impressive, the public and the policeman. ... Read more