Today the MAA students of the Introductory Studio “Wind energy machines” Tutored by Javier Peña, Rodrigo Rubio, Oriol Carrasco and Stefanos Levidis have visited the experimental wind labs of TechnoWind, located in Sant Guim de Freixenet (Lleida).

Alvaro Ibañez and Josep Maria Pujol showed us the instalations that Technowind use to test their windmills, Technowind by Ficosa Renovables is a young company that offer energy solutions, specialized in hybrid systems composed by solar panel and windmills. The headquarters are located in in Rubí (Barcelona), where they design and fabricate vertical axis windmills .

In Sant Guim de Freixenet, the group has the i+D lab, where they test the new models of wind turbines and new prototypes with different solutions in design . The biggest windmill that is being tested in the wind lab is able to generate 5Kw without any kind of noise.

The visit ended under a horizontal axis wind turbine that allowed students to realize and understand one of the most important concepts of the introductory studio: energy scales.

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IAAC was invited to be part of the Nuqat, Platform for Creatives in the Middle East, represented by IAAC MAA Director Areti Markopoulou, Fab Lab Bcn Coordinator Anastasia Pistofidou and Yousef Alnafisi, IAAC Alumni from Kuwait. Areti and Anastasia are speakers at the Conference, as well as heading a workshop on 3D Printing. Have a look at how its been going so far!

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Today the MAA students of the Introductory Studio “When Energy Becomes Form” directed by Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto and Carmelo Zappulla, visited, with professor Silvia Bures, the algae bioreactor and constructed wetlands of the GEMMA- Group of Environmental Engineering and Microbiology at the Dept. of Hydraulics, Maritime and Environmental Engineering of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona. The students were received by professor Joan Garcia, Head of the Department and director of the experiments, and also by Clara and Raquel, the PhD students working on the systems.

The installations, in the terrace of the University Building at Campus Nord,  consist of a couple of algae bioreactors that treat wastewaters from the University area. The algae grow by catching the sun’s energy in form of Photosynthesis, and are fed by the nutrients dissolved in the wastewater. Periodically, the algae biomass is collected and it is transferred to a laboratory, were it is digested anaerobically to obtain biogas.

Also in the terrace the students could visit a series of constructed wetlands that are also used for treating wastewaters. In one of them they have installed a pair of electrodes that catch the energy from the redox reactions produced by the microbial activity that are in the soil.

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Today the Introductory Studio Tutored by Javier Peña, Rodrigo Rubio, Oriol Carrasco and Stefanos Levidis, Presented their prototypes and project advancement for the mid-term review, before the Studio tutors, as well as IAAC Academic Coordinator Silvia Brandi, Antonio Sanmartin, and Claudia Pasquero. Check out their progress!

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Tonight we had the pleasure of hosting IAAC Faculty Claudia Pasquero, representing ecoLogicStudio, that she co-fouded with MArco Poletto, also IAAC Faculty.

The lecture illustrated bio-inspired algorithmic design methods at the core of ecoLogicStudio’s works and academic research. Computation, both analogue, biologic and digital, is deployed to enable the study of iterative, adaptive and resilient design solutions across a fluid eco-social terrain, generating a multiplicity of responses and effects ranging scales and regimes, from the molecular to the territorial, from the quasi-instantaneous to the geological.

The dissolution of the dichotomy artifice versus nature opens new possibilities in the conception of the city from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Urban design can then be conceived as the breeding of relationships between industrial, agricultural, biological and social systems. This emergent notion of bio-urbanity establishes a link between the instant and immaterial qualities of contemporary urbanism and the slow and material cycles of biological life.

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