Everyday life at the Institute for advanced architecture of Catalonia
Day 2 of the Brick Works Thin-Tile Vault Seminar was and intense and productive day at the Valldaura Self-Sufficient Labs.
The day started out with recycling wood for the formwork necessary to accomplish the structure, that was later assembled. The group of students and tutors also dug the soil for the foundations, then laying out the plastic protection for the soil.
Construction will start on Day 3, so stay tuned for the next steps.
IaaC, in collaboration with Map13 Architects: Marta Domenech, David Lopez, Mariana Palumbo, and BLOCK Research Group, ETH Zurich, are happy to announce the inauguration of an intensive, 2 week-long workshop where a team of 27 Students will design and contruct a thin-tile vault in our forest campus in Valldaura.
Advanced digital tools along with traditional century-old Catalan masonry techniques will be deployed in the process, with students seeking to re-engineer, compute, and eventually construct a Vault in the forest.
IaaC is also furthering this research investigating in the field of advanced robotic fabrication techniques towards the implementation and automization of these complex catalan vault forms.
IaaC | Fab Lab Barcelona was featured in El Periodico as a central player for Digital Fabrication innovation in Barcelona, and in preparation for FAB10, the 10th International Fab Lab Conference that will be held in IaaC | Fab Lab Barcelona this year.
Barcelona is a city with an important and imposing industrial history, and that is currently supporting and pushing for innovation in many fields, including economy, culture and education. The main mission for the city of Barcelona is to redefine the future of cities based on a self-sufficiency model for the production of resources and social well-being.
In this sense, Barcelona will be the first city in the world to have a public network of Fab Labs, as part of the cities future plan, and in line with Fab10′s main theme: From Fab Labs to Fab Cities, by which the city of Barcelona aims to have at least one Fab Lab in every district. This implementation will allow to discover the talent present in the city itself, give the citizens and users the possibility to gain understanding and control of the technology available and its potentials.
Read the article here.
Tonight we had the pleasure of hosting Philippe Rahm as part of the IaaC Spring Lecture Series with a lecture entitled Thermodynamic Cities. Mr Rahm discussed themes regarding thermodynamics applied to architectural design, on all scales, through a series of works that have been developed in his Studio Philippe Rahm Architectes.
Philippe Rahm is architect, principal in the office of Philippe Rahm architectes, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. In 2002, he was chosen to represent Switzerland at the 8th Architecture Biennale in Venice, and was one of the 25 Manifesto’s Architects of Aaron Betsky’s 2008 Architectural Venice Biennale. He is nominee in 2009 for the Ordos Prize in China and in 2010 and 2008 for the International Chernikov Prize in Moscow where he was ranked in the top ten. He has participated in a number of exhibitions worldwide (Archilab, Orléans, France 2000; SF-MoMA 2001; CCA Kitakyushu 2004; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2003-2006 and 2007; Manifesta 7, 2008; Louisiana museum, Denmark, 2009; Guggenheim Museum, New-York 2010). In 2007, he had a personal exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Mr. Rahm was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome (2000). He was Headmaster at the AA School in London in 2005-2006, Visiting professor at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture in Switzerland in 2004 and 2005, at the ETH Lausanne in 2006 and 2007, at the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts of Copenhagen in 2009- 2010, in Oslo at the AHO in 2010-2011. From 2010 to 2012, he held the Jean Labatut Professorship in Princeton University, USA. He has lectured widely, including at Harvard School of Design, Cooper Union, UCLA and the ETH Zürich. He is working on several private and public projects in France, Taiwan, Italy and Germany. His recent work includes in 2011 the first prize for the 69ha Taichung Gateway Park in Taiwan, an office building of 13000 m2 in La Défense in France for the EPADESA; a convective condominium for the IBA in Hamburg, Germany; the white geology, a stage design for contemporary art in the Grand-Palais on the Champs-Elysées in Paris in 2009 and a studio house for the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in 2008. Monographic books include Physiological architecture published by Birkhaüser in 2002, Distortions, published by HYX in 2005, Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow, published by Skira in 2006 and Architecture météorologique published by Archibooks in 2009.
Massimo Banzi came to IaaC on the 28th of February 2014 to share his thoughts on “Open Sourcing Innovation” as part of the IaaC Winter Lecture Series. In this occasion he was interviewed by Lluís Amiguet of La Contra, and the interview was published yesterday, check it out!
IaaC was represented by Rodrigo Rubio tonight at the Roca Gallery Barcelona that hosted a conference regarding Self Sufficient Energy, and in particular the Case of the Solar Decathlon in Catalonia. The evening was kicked off by Georg W. Reinberg who gave an introduction entitled “Towards an efficient and productive Architecture”. A series of projects and prototypes were then presented among which the Fab Lab House developed in IaaC for the Solar decathlon 2010 held in Madrid. Other projects presented included: Torsten Masseck (Low3); Jordi Mitjans, Adrià Vilajoana, Bernat Colomé, Martí Obiols, Guillem Ramon Pernau, Sara Ferran, (ETSAV).
This was the first session of a Series of conferences that will be held at the Roca Gallery Barcelona all regarding the theme of Efficiency in Architecture.