The social and technological revolutions, combined with the recent crises, have again brought attention to the housing issue in the main western urban environments. More and more people are moving to cities, reopening the architectural debate of the Existenzminimum and the Minimum Living Cell to cope with an ever-increasing demand and ever-less available space combined with the desire to provide decent housing solutions for emergent lifestyles. A contemporary living cell that, after the second wave of the feminist movement and digital technologies, often coincides with the bedroom and that is supported by a plethora of shared domestic uses on a more urban scale. It is an emerging and often informal domesticity that has the potential to influence the architecture and perception of the house. It does not necessarily imply that the houses should be smaller or that the bedrooms bigger, but that new domestic hierarchies are emerging and shaping spatial relations and necessities.

Workshops, as learning public spaces, are no longer the context to produce objects, but the space_time for actions and abstraction processes beyond any utilitarian purpose that keeps hidden from innovation indicators. In the architectural workshop, teaching practice is not understood as a simulation, but as a real architectural process and a political practice. Specul-actions is the preparatory workshop in strategic actions related to project where students get involved in processes that foster knowledge attitudes in transversal and interdisciplinary ways with a flexible and experiencing pedagogic system. Through strategically designed short actions, students are expected to develop their capacities to become free by mean of the destruction of the collective imaginary, once questioned the daily fundaments through defamiliarization exercises. En una época marcada por la eficiencia, no hay mayor rebeldía que la inutilidad. El taller, como espacio público del aprendizaje, ha dejado de ser únicamente el espacio de producción de bienes para transformarse en el espacio-tiempo de innovación y producción de acciones y abstracciones ajenas a cualquier finalidad utilitarista, y que por tanto permanecen ocultos a los indicadores de innovación y por tanto a las políticas públicas. En el taller, la práctica docente es entendida en sí misma como práctica política y arquitectónica, y no como simulacro. Especulacciones es un taller propedéutico de acciones estratégicas vinculadas al proyectar impartido en el grado de Fundamentos de la ETSAM desde 2010 ; implica un modelo pedagógico flexible y experimental que a través de acciones estratégicas de corta duración, busca generar en los alumnos la capacidad para ser libres, destruyendo el imaginario colectivo, cuestionando los fundamentos cotidianos desde arriesgados procedimientos de extrañamiento.

The dwelling always held work activities. However, with the emergence of capital, work spread more and more in the city, abandoning the dwelling due to new dynamics of mass production and accumulation that were no longer suited to the small scale of the house. It resulted in a gradual rethinking of domestic spaces, leading to the definition of the established duality of home/work. Instead, the digital revolution and the advent of capital’s ‘immaterial work’ in western countries placed the domestic space as the potential epicentre of capitalist production. Immaterial work is not bound by spatial constraints and can therefore be carried out anywhere, even and especially at home. The insertion of production dynamics within the domestic sphere is generating numerous spatial-temporal conflicts of traditional places and functions, leading to new everyday life and new spatial needs. The paper therefore analyses the changing dynamics of the home and its spatial possibilities emerging from the potential merge of immaterial productivity with domesticity.

The Valley of the Fallen is the largest fascist monument constructed during Franco's regime. It comprises the largest Civil War cemetery; the corpses of Franco and Primo de Rivera; the tallest Christian cross in the world; a basilica carved out in the mountain; a Benedictine monastery and a 1000 hectares man-made forest. While the Valley’s symbolic conflict in contemporary Spain has been studied extensively, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the monument’s architecture and landscape, and the intentions of its creators. This article shows how every material object in the Valley was created to reinforce the narrative of the “new order.” The location, in the middle of the “royal route,” links Franco’s rule to the history of the Spanish Empire. The structure, calculated to last more than 1000 years, comprises a timeless architecture able to outlive the regime. The carved basilica, filled with thousands of corpses, introduces eternal time. These elements are just some examples of how the promoters of the Valley of the Fallen used time as a design tool in the creation of a site that acts as a totalitarian micro-cosmos of the regime’s ideology. Current debates about the resignification of the Valley and other recent-past monuments could benefit from understanding how the different temporal layers introduced during its creation play an active role in the monument’s meaning over time. Ultimately, the article shows how time could be used to create absolutist designs where their symbolic transformation needs to come together with a material one.

En el contexto de crisis y globalización, el Plan Bolonia ha generado un modelo universitario cuya formación se orienta casi exclusivamente hacia el acceso al mercado laboral. Consecuentemente, la subordinación a determinadas temáticas deja fuera asuntos emergentes que no encuentran cabida en los planes de estudio y solo aparecen en proyectos de innovación educativa y proyectos de aprendizaje-servicio que favorecen una relación entre la academia y la realidad. Este artículo presenta la experiencia de aprendizaje-servicio llevada a cabo desde un taller experimental en la Escuela de Arquitectura que abordó la necesidad de introducir la consideración de grupos no humanos en los procesos urbanos. Mediante el análisis de la experiencia a través de un registro sistemático cualitativo y de una revisión teórica, los resultados permiten ser valorados positivamente, detectando en el alumnado un creciente interés por promover un compromiso con lo más que humano desde un enfoque situado.