Category Archives: Lecture Series

Tuesday 19th of November: BEN FLANNER – BROOKLYN GRANGE

By admin | Published: November 15, 2013

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Tuesday 19th of November 2013
Ben Flanner
Lecture: Brooklyn Grange

@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public

BEN FLANNER
Ben Flanner is the head farmer, CEO, and co-founder of Brooklyn Grange rooftop Farm, based in New York City. A pioneering urban farm operation, the business produces vegetables, herbs, and honey on 2 ½ acres of intensive green roofs, and sells its produce to the community through various channels.  Brooklyn Grange is internationally recognized as the leader in rooftop agriculture and as an exceptional green and community-minded business. The farm offers organic farm training programs, and engages with numerous universities, and colleges.  The farm also hosts workshops, events, dinners, and even weddings.  Prior to founding the Brooklyn Grange, Flanner, who was born in Milwaukee, WI, co-founded and managed the Eagle Street Rooftop farm in 2009, the world’s first green roof farm. He has a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a background in management consulting and marketing, prior to farming.
Ben has presented to audiences including NYU Stern Business School, Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Slow Money, the Garrison Institute’s highly political “Climate, Mind, and Behavior” annual conference, the Municipal Art Society, numerous Northeastern Horticultural Societies, and has been a guest on dozens of panels and university classes.  He has taught urban agriculture courses in New York City, Toronto, and Chicago, and the senior capstone course in the Environmental Studies department at New York University (NYU).
Since its launch in 2010, Brooklyn Grange has received the LICBDC Green Business Award, the Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Award of Excellence in 2011, and Queens Community Business Award from Mayor Bloomberg’s office in 2012, and the Queens Local Food Hero award in 2011 and 2012. The farm was the single largest recipient of the Department of Environmental Protection’s 2011 Green Infrastructure grant in Stormwater Management and has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Crains, CNBC. The farm also hosted a visit and tour to New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the summer of 2012.
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Thursday 7th of November: ECOLOGICSTUDIO – ENERGY BEYOND NATURE

By admin | Published: November 4, 2013

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Thursday 7th of November 2013
ecoLogic Studio
Lecture: Ecology Beyond Nature

@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public

ECOLOGIC STUDIO
Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto are co-founders of ecoLogicStudio an architectural and urban design studio involved in digital design and architecture research for the definition of a new ecology of space and behavior.
Located in the east of London the studio has built up an international reputation for its innovative work on systemic design, a method defined by the combination and integration of systemic thinking, computational design, bio-hacking and digital prototyping. This broadened approach to design – ranging from the micro to the macro and from nanotechnologies to urban networks – is embodied into an experimental practice, where projects and installations become laboratories of interactions. Locally activated design protocols synthesize a form of expanded hyper-reality hacking larger organizational systems.Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto are active academics; they have been unit master at the Architectural Association in London, and are currently studio directors at the IAAC in Barcelona, as well as visiting critics at Cornell University.

Claudia is leader of the MArch in Urban Morphogenesis at Bartlett UCL and, with Marco, co-director of the BIO-UD Research Cluster at UCL Bartlett in London.
Their projects have been published and exhibited throughout the world, in particular in Venice Architecture Biennale (ecoMachines, 2008; The efData Grotto, 2010); Seville (STEMcloud, 2008), Istanbul (Fibrous Room, 2008), Milan (Aqva Garden, 2007), London (HORTUS 2012), in Paris (HORTUS.Paris 2013), in Orleans (Meta-folly 2013). Their latest research has been published in 2012 by Routledge in a book titled “Systemic Architecture”.

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Thursday 31st of October: ANUPAMA KUNDOO LECTURE – BUILDING KNOWLEDGE

By admin | Published: October 31, 2013

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Thursday 31st of October 2013

Anupama Kundoo

Lecture: BUILDING KNOWLEDGE - An approach to architecture in response to socio-economic and environmental concerns

@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public

At the lecture Odile Decq, Benedetta Tagliabue and Alfredo Brillembourg, will be present as well, so it seems that we’ll have an interesting debate! See you there!

 

Anupama Kundoo is known for her research-oriented practice and her practice-oriented teaching. Her internationally recognized and award-winning architecture practice demonstrates a strong focus on material research and experimentation towards an architecture that has low environmental impact and is appropriate to thesocio-economic context.

Kundoo has built extensively in India and has had the experience of working, researching and teaching in a variety ofcultural contexts across the world: TU Berlin, AA London, TU Darmstadt, Parsons New School of Design, New York and is currently teaching at University of Queensland in Brisbane. At Parsons she was the Chair for Environmental Technologies and Material Sciences and in the various schools she has taught Architectural Design, Urban Management and Environmental Technologies. She has lectured and exhibited extensively across international institutions and has conducted workshops and reviewed student work at several Universities including Cornell University, University of Melbourne, Lebanese American University and University of Limerick.

Her projects as well as writings have been featured in a wide range of books, international journals and newspapers such as Phaidon World Atlas of Contemporary Architecture, AD Architectural Design London, Modulør, ArchitectureAU, India Today, Bauwelt and Duurzaam Bowen. She has co-edited the ‘Sustainable Building Design Manual Vol. 1 and 2’ for Institut Catala d’Energia, 2004; produced in partnership with London, Barcelona and Delhi. In 2009 she authored ‘Roger Anger: Research on Beauty’, about the life and work of a prominent Parisian architect (1923-2008) of the fifties and sixties, who was appointed the Chief Architect of Auroville, an idealistic city project located in South India.

Her recent contribution to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale involved the full-scale facsimile of her ‘Wall House’ project.  As a runner-up in the 2013, ArcVision International Prize for ‘Women and Architecture’ she received an ‘Honorable Mention’ by the jury for ‘her dedication when approaching the problem of affordability of construction and sustainability in all aspects’. In 2013 she also won the Dr. Vishnu Joshi award for the best Ferrocement structure by the Indian Society of Ferrocement.

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ARNDT GOLDACK LECTURE – Dynamic Lightweight Structures

By admin | Published: October 29, 2013

Tonight we had the pleasure of hosting at IaaC a Lecture by TU Berlin Researcher Arndt Goldack as part of the Fall Term Lecture Series of 2013.

There is a trend in architecture and structural engineering towards more and more lightweight structures, as such structures are not only elegant but also minimizing the use of material. They are sustainable in the true sense. An inherent feature of lightweight structures is their tendency to be lively. Numerous exciting and breath taking structures such as membrane roofs, cable net structures and cable-supported footbridges have been built and they all require additional engineering efforts, regarding dynamics. Early lightweight footbridges have caused comfort problems for the users. Today engineers have learnt their lessons from several disasters and have included “dynamics” in the curriculum of engineering students. At our chair at the Technical University Berlin (TU Berlin) it has become an important research aspect. Beyond passive tuned mass dampers, investigation on semi-active vibration control will enable us to go beyond present limits towards more lightweight and elegant, more sustainable structures. Read More »

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Tuesday 29th of October: ARNDT GOLDACK LECTURE – Dynamic Lightweight Structures

By admin | Published: October 23, 2013

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Tuesday 29th of October 2013

Arndt Goldack

Lecture: Dynamic Lightweight Structures
@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public

Dr.-Ing. Arndt Goldack  was born in 1969 in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1996 he graduated in civil and structural engineering at the University of Stuttgart, and in 2004 Awarded Doctorate (Dr.-Ing.), Thesis “Structural behavior and Bracing of High Rise Tubes for Solar Updraft Towers”.

From 1996 to 2003 he was a Research assistant at the Institute for Structural Design with Prof. Jörg Schlaich and Prof. Werner Sobek, University of Stuttgart.

In 2003 he then commenced as Structural Engineer with schlaich bergermann und partner, Berlin, Stuttgart, until 2011. During this time he contributed to projects in China, Germany, India, Spain, USA:

- Stress ribbon bridge “Slinky springs to fame”, Oberhausen

- Membrane roof for Estadio Madrid La Peineta

- Gänsebachtal Bridge: Integral Bridge for High Speed Trains, length 1001m

- Cable Stayed Bridge crossing Yamuna River in New Delhi, India: span 250m

- Independent Review of the Second Vivekananda Bridge in Kolkata, extradosed bridge

- Lufthansa A380 Service Hall in Frankfurt

- Dynamic design of almost all footbridges by sbp

- Research Project: Design of Lightweight Footbridges for Human Induced Vibrations, Goldack et. al., JRC-ECCS 2009 in cooperation with University of Porto, TU Delft and RWTH Aachen.

Since July 2011 he has been a Researcher at the Chair of Conceptual and Structural Design, TU Berlin, studying the dynamics of bridges, pedestrian induced vibration, experimental modal analysis, lightweight structures, lightweight concrete, structural control.

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GEORGE JERONIMIDIS LECTURE – Biomimetics and Bioinspiration

By admin | Published: October 22, 2013

Tonight we had the pleasure of taking part in the Fall Lecture Series 2013 George Jeronimidis Lecture on Biomimetics and Bioinspiration.

We were invited to think about architecture in relation to biology, for example: plants share many of the same characteristics as buildings, they are fixed in their context, they must accept what nature and the environment throw at them, and they must adapt to survive. How can we learn something from biology, and apply this to the field of architecture?

The first point of the Lecture lead us to understand exactly what Biomimetics is. Prof. Jeronimidis noted that there are ibfact many ideas as to what Biomimetics is, but the one he relates most to is: “the abstraction of good design from nature” (J.F. Vincent).

Biomimesis should aim not to replace biology, but to understand the mechanisms that biology has developed overtime, and understand what we can then use these mechanisms for. Mimesis, not understood as copying, but as abstraction.

Read More »

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Tuesday 22nd of October: GEORGE JERONIMIDIS LECTURE – Biomimetics and Bioinspiration

By admin | Published: October 22, 2013

George Jeronimidis

Tuesday 22nd of October 2013

George Jeronimidis

Lecture: Biomimetics and Bioinspiration - Smart solutions for functional architecture
@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public 

Professor George Jeronimidis is currently Emeritus Professor of Composite Materials Engineering  and Director of the Centre for Biomimetics in the School of Construction Management at the University of Reading.  In 2009 he became Co-Director of the Emergent Technologies and Design programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.  He obtained his doctorate at the University of Rome and moved to the University of Reading in the 1970’s.
His research interests cover the design of composite fibrous structures in biology engineering and architecture to achieve high levels of functional integration.  He has published extensively in the fields of biomechanics, biomimetics, wood science, composite mechanics, smart materials and structures and bio-inspired systems in engineering and architecture.
He is currently on the Editorial Board of the new international journal Virtual and Physical Prototyping, Wood Science and Technology and Biomimetics & Bioinspiration.
In 2009 he was elected President of President of BIOKON International (from 2009), a European Network for the promotion of Biomimetics in relevant sectors (engineering, architecture, built environment, materials, sensors,…). In 2005 he became a Fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science (IAWS) and served as Chairman of the Academy Board of the IAWS from 2010 to 2013.
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