Joaquin Alvado, University of Alicante, Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Dynamic cities
What do we refer to when we talk about Architecture?
This is the question that our architectural research at the University of Alicante revolves around. We want to talk from scratch about innovation, social behaviour, nature, growth, time, change, sustainability, weather, citizenship, atmosphere, water, adaptability, welfare, and environment. We use research as a technical tool to work on diversity, an open future, emotion, imagination, and a complete portfolio to establish a dynamic process that will help us formulate concepts concerning architecture and life.
The structure of a City is related to time, space and existence. Cities are real dynamic systems, chaotic descriptions. Had we conceived cities as dynamic structures, we would have learned from the beginning that architecture is related to innovation and sustainability. Nowadays, Architecture has many things to say about the real change and the real need for a shift towards sustainability.
In dynamic systems, time and space are interdependent, there is no apparent center or order. In our research, we focus on dynamic diagrams of geometry which create the shape of a structure, thus giving architectural design presence. As a Dynamic system we work with Iteration and sensitivity as initial conditions. It is under those parameters that a system process becomes a structure. Our approach is related to two main items: emptiness and dynamic systems. Emptiness is related to iteration and recursion, while dynamic systems are related to sensitivity to initial conditions.
Emptiness as a “democratic space” is projected as a conflict between virtual and real space. It gives architecture a kind of depth that is not exhausted on a spatial scale, but works jointly with the virtual space to manifest its void as a possibility. It is a probability, and it is shown as a domain within the realm of possibility. It transcends architecture’s perception as an "object" at the moment or stage that we become aware of its existence.
Networks connecting city spaces are instruments for understanding their structural functions. Diagrams and city maps depend on the shape and quality of the networks. In our research, networks are based on cultural background. New policies for sustainable cultural thought will become the answer to future design questions and new identity systems.
Our approach works with dynamic three-dimensional structures. Each unit becomes a tensional network of visual negotiations. Geometry reinforces the effect of chaotic order in such a way that certain “informal” elements become structural supports for space. The visual complex of spatial interconnections is established through democratic architecture as emptiness. The tensional organisation is based on diagrams, on creating three-dimensional connections in which order is magnified into a labyrinth of structures at a small-object scale.
Shape, like a dynamic diagram, is a reflection of the standard financial elements present through history and their poetry. In our research, cities’ history is key to understanding the voyage through public and private architecture and the prevailing developments in cultural life structures.
The sensitivity of dynamic systems to initial conditions means that an asymptotic behaviour of a system can be altered by even the slightest of changes in the initial conditions: “the butterfly effect”. As we well know, we need to educate the next generations to stay true to the initial conditions.