Category Archives: Syllabus

Sketch by Javier Peña (IAAC-MAA, ,Leading Self Sufficient Buildings Studio)

Sketch by Javier Peña (IAAC-MAA, ,Leading Self Sufficient Buildings Studio)

Architecture goes beyond buildings. A building is a concentration of activities in a particular location which should be responsive to concrete cultural, social, economic and technological conditions. In the 21st century, the buildings are more than machines for dwelling in. They should be living organisms, capable of interacting with their environment, following the principles of ecology or biology rather than those of mere construction. In effect, a building should be like a tree, which is able to rooting itself in a particular place, generating its own energy, interacting with the natural networks around it and creating complex ecosystems and landscapes together with other trees.
The Self-Sufficient Buildings group works on scales that range from the macro-building to the individual home developing principles and techniques that serve to organize the materialization of programmatic nodes of activity based on natural rules and principles. As a result, the building goes beyond being a mere interface for the economic activities it houses to being an environment that stimulates its inhabitants and functions as an active part of the ecosystem in which it is inserted. Buildings also need to respond to specific cultural conditions, and the multicultural global vision that the IaaC represents allows can be applied, via debate and research, to architecture projects anywhere in the world. This group devotes special attention to housing and the new forms of social organization of our time, by way of buildings with shared spaces, or macrobuildings that incorporate all the functions of a city. This group is working to introduce innovative techniques such as local energy generation, the development of self-suffi cient buildings, the incorporation of hydrogen into the building and the use of new materials, responding to each situation with ad-hoc techniques and principles.