TÀN 58: Material Intelligence and Environmental Responsiveness in Adaptive Student Housing | Masters Design Project

Site Context

TÀN 58 is located in Poblenou, Barcelona, a district defined by its industrial past and ongoing urban transformation. The site sits within a dense, mixed-use urban fabric where former factories and warehouses are being reimagined as creative and residential spaces. Concurrently, the project investigates the source of its primary material, cork, tracing it back to the forests where it is harvested.

This approach creates a double landscape: one urban, one ecological. By connecting the city to the natural origin of its materials, the project situated its intervention within broader environmental and social systems, emphasizing the cyclical relationship between extraction, labor, and application. The program includes student housing, designed not only for living but as a point of dialogue between the urban site and its material ecological context.

Through this lens, TÀN 58 engages both the industrial city and the cork forest, grounding architectural work in place-based knowledge and ecological awareness.

Design Process

The design process began with the deconstruction of a domestic appliance—specifically, a space heater—to investigate fundamental energy phenomena. Through this hands-on exploration, the team developed an understanding of convection and heat transfer, observing how air and materials interact to distribute warmth.

They then repurposed the heater’s components to construct a small-scale climatic model, allowing them to recreate and visualize energy flows in a controlled setting. Cork was introduced into this model to test its insulating and thermal storage properties, revealing its capacity to absorb, store, and radiate heat effectively.

These insights led to their first architectural experiment: the Machine Room, a study of three cork spaces each maintained at different temperatures. This prototype enabled the team to explore spatial arrangements, material performance, and passive climate strategies in a tangible way.

Ultimately, the lessons learned from the Machine Room were scaled up to inform TÀN 58. The project embodies the culmination of iterative testing, material research, and environmental understanding, translating small-scale experiments into a full-scale, climate-responsive architectural intervention.

Final Outcome

The design of TÀN 58 inhabits a rigid structural frame, within which cork-based living units function as mobile modules. These elements can be repositioned throughout the framework to optimize thermal comfort, daylight access, and ventilation. Guided by computational simulations of sunlight, heat, and wind, the arrangement of these modules allows the building to adapt to shifting climatic conditions while maintaining a comfortable interior environment.

Natural ventilation and heat regulation are achieved through two central atriums. As warm air rises, the cork walls absorb and later radiate stored heat, creating a thermally stable environment driven by passive performance rather than mechanical systems. In this way, TÀN 58 demonstrates the potential of material intelligence, parametric design, and human-centered climate strategies to transform industrial urban sites into sustainable and livable architecture.

To communicate both the spatial logic and environmental function of the design, the final outcome includes physical models, technical drawings, computational maps, and visualizations. The models make the relationships between cork modules, atriums, and structural constraints physically legible, while the drawings articulate the modular organization and passive systems. Performance maps reveal how light, heat, and wind operate across the site, and visualizations situate the architecture within its urban context, reflecting the ecological origins of its primary material.

Together, these representations bridge the gap between experimental research and full-scale application—demonstrating how early material testing and climatic investigation guided the development of the built proposal realized in TÀN 58.

Conclusion: Ultimately, TÀN 58 proposes a future where architecture actively participates in climate moderation—one that prioritizes human well-being while reducing reliance on mechanical resources, and where thoughtful material use becomes a catalyst for ecological renewal.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]