Architecture Students Take on Urban Reality with Spanish Music Center

Eight Cornell architecture students in an Arch 501 studio received real-world experience this semester, working on a new community music center to be built in Valencia, Spain.

Students visited the site over spring break and met with architects in Valencia.

"We wanted to share all of our doubts and our concerns professionally with the students, with a real site, real conditions and the environment of what the project would be," said Anton García-Abril, principal architect of Ensamble Studio in Madrid, who taught the studio with colleague Debora Mesa Molina.

"We're working with the real needs of the city of Valencia.

Reality in urbanism and architecture is so strong that we don't need to create any fiction around it."

"We believe in the enormous talent of the students," García-Abril said.

"Architecture is something very difficult to teach.

You just can't transmit your point of view and your experience, but you can get them to take a lot of cultural interest and give them a little bit of guidance and stimulus to see how architecture works.

We can show them how we look at life through our architectural vision."