Everyday life at the Institute for advanced architecture of Catalonia
The Open Thesis Fabrication group had a visit this week at Media-TIC by Cloud9. The tour at the building was made by Mireia Luzárraga (cloud9). The general context of the area and how Media Tic is standing next to its surroundings as well as the facades systems and the electronic control that responces to the different environmental needs for the confort of the building floors was presented on site to the group by Mireia.
Ramón Sagarra gave a lecture class about the concept of Smart Cities in Barcelona and he explained the work being done within this field in 22@.
Ramón Sagarra Rius is an industrial engineer by the High Technical School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona, MBA by ESADE and Master in industrial automatization and robotics by UPC.
In the present time, he’s director of infrastructures of 22@Barcelona. He’s also member of the executive committee of ITCAT the company responsible of the deployment of de optical fiber in Catalonia. Assistant Professor in the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
The Digital tools class is oriented to facilitate the students with the knowledge of contemporary design tools in order to enable 3D and 2D strategies for design and representation. This seminar class is tutored by Luis Fraguada with the assistance of Amay Uday Gurkar .
Above image, Antoni Vives and Marta Malé-Alemany
Last Friday IAAC inaugurated the Master in Advanced Architecture 2011/12. The inauguration started with a welcome speech from the Rector of UPC Antoni Giró , the president of IAAC Javier Niéto and Antoni Vives the Deputy Mayor of the urban Habitat of Barcelona at the Barcelona City Hall.
Marta Malé – Alemany , the acting director of IAAC after her speech welcomed the guest lecturer Thom Mayne.
Thom Mayne from Morphosis opened this year’s Lecture series with his lecture: ¨Questions (on the continuity of Contradiction)¨
The North American architect during his lecture presented older and new projects that depicted his notion in terms of dynamic dialogue and sensibility in a synthesis were ¨deconstruction rather puts things together than separating them¨
¨We create ourselves as absolut fabrication¨ Thom Mayne
Thom Mayne and Vicente Guallart (founder of IAAC)
Salvador Rueda , is the director of the ¨Ecologia Urbana¨since 2000. Sarvador Rueda is a biology scientist that holds as well a diploma in Energy management, a diploma in Environmental Engineering and has a licence of Psycology.
Salvador Rueda had a lecture about the structure of the city plan of Barcelona and the reasons for the urban design decisions that were made for the construction of the city. Based on Barcelona traditional city blocks he proposed the so called ¨super block¨, a network of city blocks designed to optimize both vehicular and pedestrian flows while liberating large amounts of public spaces. The lecture was part of the introductory studio facilitating the students with information about new strategies for re-designing a contemporary city.
IAAC today opens its doors to the public for the inauguration of the Master in Advanced Architecture 2011-12. The inauguration of the Master will start with special short speeches from the invited participants:
Antoni Giró, Rector, Politechnic University of Catalunya, UPC
Antoni Vives, Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Barcelona City Hall
Javier Nieto, President, IAAC Board of Trustees,
while Thom Mayne will Open this year´s MAA Lecture Series with his lecture :
¨Questions (on the continuity of Contradiction)¨
Thom Mayne founded Morphosis as an interdisciplinary and collective practice involved in experimental design and research in 1972. Mr. Mayne is also co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture and Distinguished Professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010, appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009, and honored with the American Institute of Architects /Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2000. With Morphosis, Mayne has been the recipient of the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize, 26 Progressive Architecture Awards and over 100 American Institute of Architecture Awards. Morphosis works have been published extensively. The firm has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and 25 monographs.
The MAA students started working in groups for the introductory studio class. The studio ¨Barcelona Superblocks Many Slow Cities into a Smart City¨ focuses on the city of Barcelona and the challenges that it faces in terms of information, sustainability, ecology,fabrication.The students are working on ideas of inclusive urban experience towards models of coexistence, of the above disciplines, that could eventually create flexible and adaptive networks.
The tutors of the class :
Areti Markopoulou(MAA Director), Salvador Rueda (Director – Agencia Ecologia Urbana) and Tomas Diez (FabLab Barcelona Manager), with the assistance of Ioanna Spanou (Landscape Architect,GIS Expert) and Tomas Vivanco (Architect,Ecotect Expert)
During the Introduction of the class the students performed different groups and were assigned to work on different ¨Super Blocks¨ which they already started exploring and getting the fist results out of their research.