Geocat Territorial Loops - Tapa dura

Description: GeoCat sets out to follow the tradition of charting or map-making as the capturing of visual records of a territory--in this case, Catalonia--where the force of the urban seems to presage imminent transformation in its environment. Catalonia is a heterogeneous and plural territory, rich and diverse. The visualization of the multiple facets and fragments that make up this territory offered by GeoCat evidences the richness of this diversity, but also manifests the need for the effective management of its disequilibriums and the permanent transformation it is subjected to by human activity. These photographs by Laura Cantarella lend themselves to a curious ambiguity: presented in a super-panoramic format (represented here by more than 40 4-page color gatefolds), they deploy themselves before us like a vast register of extended horizons, diverse, changing, varied. However, when we hold the edges of the picture in our fingers and bend it until they meet, we discover an unexpected 360-degree diorama that reveals the true format of the image: that of a circular view as the translation of a polyfocal, multiple gaze attentive to the recognition of an nth-dimensional reality. In effect, Cantarella's photographs bend space and time in a single image.

Vicente Guallart works in the confluence of Architecture, artificial nature and technologies. Some of his more relevant projects are the Denia Mountain (reconstruction of an old quarry, in an environment that hold and old Arab castle, selected for the Venice Biennale 2004), 3 ports in the North of Taiwan that will improve the tourism in the island (winners of 2 international competitions), or the Sharing Tower in the neighborhood of la Torre (Valencia). He spent part of his time with research and educational projects as former director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC), in Barcelona, that holds an international postgraduate program on Architecture and Urbanism working in many scales from Bits to geography . In 2000 he co-directed with MIT s Media Lab and another research Center, the Media House Project, the prototype of an informational house, based for the first time, in distributed computation. He is author of the master Plan of the project Sociopolis, a housing project in Valencia that allows the urban development and the protection of the agriculture environment. He coordinates a group of international architects that will build different equipments and housing projects in this neighborhood. This project was shown in the Valencia Biennale, or the Arkitertur Zentrum in Vienna. It will be built for the year 2007. He is co-author of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture Actar, HiperCatalonia or Media House Project. The Korean publishing house DD dedicates the monograph Intelligent realities to his work. Actar publishing house is preparing his new book Media, Mountains and Architecture . He has given lectures in different Universities and Cities around the world as Princeton University, Upenn, Architectural Association, UCLA, MIT, Space (Seoul), Woodbury University, Taipei and others. His work has been exhibit in the Biennale di Venezia 2002, 2004 and 2008, Archilab, Gratz, and others. He is currently Chief Architect of the Barcelona City Council, Spain