The project's activities took place in the school, the library and at the City Hall, in the town and its surroundings (on Monday and Friday), Morella (on Tuesday), Taragona (on Wednesday) and Valencia (on Thursday).
The delegation was received on Monday by the school's management and project team and then, at the City Hall, we were welcomed by the mayor. There were organized ice-breaking activities, the initial questionnaires were completed and the activities of the participating countries were presented. The Senia is a typical Catalan town in a beautiful rural area, one of the entry points to the Els Natural Park Ports, but also half an hour's drive to the Delta de l'Ebre Natural Park.
The next day we all went to Morella, an ancient fortified city located at an altitude of about 1000 m in Castellón province, Valencian Community, Spain, where there are traces left by the Iberians, Greeks and Romans, but also Visigoths and Moors. Architecture - the topic of the meeting - is here at the confluence of several cultures, but dominated by a castle which witnessed many battles, being destroyed and rebuilt many times. Thus, the medieval architecture was well illustrated by the old town center.
The students also attended a laboratory of the Chemistry Faculty the Rovira and Virgili University, where they studied chemical reactions that alter the water temperature and experimented the production of electricity from renewable sources.
Valencia is the city where architectural space has been remarkably reinvented, its development deserving a place of honor in any urbanism manual. The devastating floods from about 60 years ago determined the municipality to deflect the Turia River, its empty dump becoming a huge green chain composed of flower gardens, fountains, statuary groups, lush parks with exotic palms and plants, outdoor sports centers, generous playgrounds, bicycle and jogging circuits or concert halls. Valencia was chosen by the organizers to illustrate the modern architecture of the City of Arts and Sciences (Ciutat de les Arts and les Ciències), a futuristic complex composed of the Principe Felipe Museum of Science, the Imax cinema and the L'Hemisfèric planetarium, the park L'Oceanografic, L'Umbracle Garden and Opera Reina Sofia. Santiago Calatrava Valls and Félix Candela are the architects who dared to imagine this fabulous project.
Tarragona is an important city in Catalonia that brought to our project the Roman architecture through the archaeological ensemble enrolled in 2000 on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
With the information gathered in these activities, on the last day, the students made mixed projects that featured aspects of the Catalan architecture, voted the best project, and completed the final questionnaires.
The teachers had two working meetings to analyze the project's progress and to draw the coordinates of its completion. There were discussed once again the problems related to the size of the models, the material for their realization, the scale of representation and the way of arrangement of these models in an exhibition.