Abstract :
My 3D neighborhood brings fourth-year architecture students from Barcelona together in close contact with the local 11 -year-olds attending this school to collaborate over the course of eight school weeks to rediscover the constellation of their own home environments - and the many intervening neighborhoods, stretched out among them, that they traverse on their way to meet each other in class each day - through the manipulation of 3D-modeling software to generate overlaid and interconnected, animated space-diagram walk-throughs. Each architecture student works one-on-one with a child in coupled team-pairs to model the thresholds and sequences of the urban space that surrounds them and reaches their respective doorsteps, revealing and giving form to their fleeting and ambivalent neighborhood, ultimately leading to proposals for vital bottom-up visions of design change that can enrich everyday, workaday life. 3D-modelling technology acts as the catalyst for interaction and participation among the pairs, and as the medium for ongoing discovery. Architecture students and kids have the chance to learn and use advanced modeling both on the computer and in the making of physical, computer-cut models that build and reveal unseen space, applying them to an expanded, transcendental vision of their own surroundings
