Today, led by Areti Markopoulou, Director of the IAAC Global School, and Tomas Diez, Project Coordinator for the Fab Lab BCN, IAAC welcomed students participating in the 2011 IAAC Global Summer School, Self<a>rchitecture, for the first day of class. All activities for the day were broadcasted live in Mumbai where students at The Balwant Sheth School of Architecture (BSSA) will be collaborating simultaneously with students in Barcelona. The group working in Barcelona is made up of 20 students from 14 different countries, spanning 5 continents.
On the first day of class, students were introduced to the goals of the project as well as taking part in a workshop using Ecotect. Over the next two weeks the Summer School will be exploring how information affects the construction of the physical world, and how cities and their built elements can be seen as informational architecture systems.
(Above: Areti Markopoulou and Tomas Diez giving and introduction of Global Summer School 2011)
About the IAAC Global Summer School
The IAAC Global Summer School (GSS) is testing a distributed educational model seeking to generate a dynamic network based on distributed knowledge and collective actions.
IAAC GSS is taking place simultaneously in Barcelona, Turin and Mumbai. Students located in Barcelona (IAAC) and Mumbai (BSSA) will work under the same thematic research sharing seminars as well as broadcasted lectures from Barcelona, Mumbai, Turin, and Texas.
Self<a>rchitecture is an agenda, with both research and educational goals, that combines science and technology with architecture and urban planning.
Throughout the program students will work in collaboration with many experts in the fields of environmental research and information technology including: Urbiotica, Masimo Banzi (Arduino), Usman Haque (Pachube), Thales Alenia Space, Nikos Salingaros, Dhananjay Gadre, Andrew Pane, Carlo Ratti (MIT SENSEable City Lab), Autodesk, McNeel Europe, and more.