A les Eines!

Invited by the association Amics de l’Ateneu Santboiá (Friends of the Saint Baudilus Athenaeum), we held a workshop called A les Eines! (Pick up your tools!) as a part of the process of building our own equipment and furnishings for the Ateneu Santboià Athenaeum Terrace. The workshop focused on collectively designing and constructing functional prototypes for a mobile workshop table and a collective toolbox to be used in later stages of the project’s evolution.

The A les Eines! workshop took place over two sessions: an initial design and formalisation session from November 18–20, 2016, and another session from March 4–5, 2017, for the final results and documentation.

La Terrasseta (The Terrace) is an initiative of Amics de l’Ateneu Santboià in collaboration with Recetas Urbanas that aims to intervene in the outdoor space around the entrance to the enclosure of the Ateneu Santboià in Barcelona. It is a collective, artistic and community-based construction project that seeks to open up the enclosure to the public, reviving its place in the city’s social and cultural life. To do this the initiative has created spaces for cooperative work between local and international architecture collectives, entities and residents of the old town district and anyone else who wants to join.

We started the workshop by analysing La Terrasseta’s transformative and storage spaces as well as the various dynamic elements of the project’s workshop days (transformation processes, tools used, consumables, PPE, project documentation and workplace safety, management tools, etc.). Our objective was to identify the minimum required infrastructure needs for both designs.

The raw materials used for the mobile spaces were the same materials used for La Terrasseta’s equipment, as well as other reclaimed materials from around Sant Boi (OSB and MDF boards, particle board, metallic structures from old office desks, wire mesh, mecalux structures, alucobond sheets, etc.).