In collaboration with the exhibition Parameter: Digital Collaborative Design in Tel Aviv, IAAC faculty Areti Markopoulou and Luis Fraguada held a five day workshop called Data Driven Structures.

In this workshop participants were challenged to rethink urbanity based on  information gathered throughout the city. The goal of the workshop was to understand how could data-driven structures affect the construction of the physical world, how cities and its built elements could be viewed as informational architecture systems.

Led by Areti nd Luis (above), the students worked on 4 case studies in Tel Aviv that were chosen based on urban criteria such as attractors,density, public space and heavy infrastructure.

Student groups visited the 4 different case studies and walk around them with the ASKit, a sensor kit developed at the Fab Lab BCN able to gather information on temperature, light, movement and CO2 as well as the specific longitude and latitude at each moment gathered by an integrated GPS on the sensor kit.

Students extracted the collected data from the ASKit and map them in order to understand the case studies based on real time collected data.

Based on the information extracted students made urban proposals and rehabilitation strategies for the 4 case studies. The intent of the workshop was not to merely interface with the built environment but to implement strategies which transform built environments into information systems.

Part of the workshop’s strategy was focused on testing ways of collecting the urban data by using the ASKit and others were focused on how those data could inform a structure that in its turn gives information to the city network.

Students developed their proposals by using rhino, grasshopper and ghowl (a plugin for rhino developed by Luis Fraguada) and they worked on fabricating their proposals using the new CNC milling machine that was set up and inaugurated by Areti and Luis.