Reconnecting historic industrial sites with their urban surroundings: the case of the Royal Shipyard in Barcelona

Industrial buildings are usually designed as large-scale projects to accommodate secluded spaces for production. During recent decades, coinciding with the relocation of manufacturing infrastructures outside the city, many urban development policies have focused on the reconversion of historic industrial sites. These large buildings are often given a new public or semi-public function, thus creating the need to rethink the building’s relationship with its urban context. To this end, a new type of interaction between those buildings and urban social life is required. This demands contemporary urban design solutions to enhance such buildings’ connectedness and integration with their neighbourhood surroundings. The focus of this paper is to analyse the architectural design strategies being implemented in the framework of this change of use, focusing on the specific case of the former Royal Shipyard (now the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, MMB) in Barcelona, Spain.

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Open