Students of the IAAC Global Summer School are working hard in preparation for tomorrow’s final presentations.  This week students have been focused on the digital fabrication and construction of their proposed models for the section of the Barcelona SuperBlock they have been assigned.

The Summer School students will present tomorrow at 12:00h at IAAC before a guest jury of Marta Malé-Alemany (IAAC, Co-Director MAA) Willy Müller (IAAC, Co-Director MAA) Lucas Cappelli (Director, Advanced Architecture Competition), Antoni Brey (URBIOTICA) and Andreu Ulied (MCRIT).

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(Above: Arduino Hub Board)

After yesterday’s lecture with Massimo Banzi, co-creator of Arduino, the Global Summer School students began their Arduino Tutorials, led by instructor Alex Posada. Students are learning how to use arduino with the intention to implement strategies that will transform built environments into “smart” information systems.

The summer school projects are focused on using different technologies and “smart” ideas that could optimize the different network layers in their Barcelona SuperBlock. Students are applying these ideas to the city scale as well as to the scale of an individual citizen. Read More »

Week 2 of the IAAC Global Summer school began on Monday morning with students jumping right into their Rhino and Grasshopper tutorials with Jacek Markusiewicz. Over the weekend each group continued analysis of their assigned blocks, building a greater understanding how it fits within the Barcelona SuperBlock and the rest of the city. This analysis was in preparation for group presentations which took place on Monday evening.

The six groups presented their preliminary results of their observations and environmental analysis using data derived from Ecotect, the consumption table, as well as data collected over the weekend using the Ambient Sensor Kits. After each group presented, each of the six groups were assigned a specific function within the SuperBlock.

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(Above: Tomas Diez, Project Manager in the Fab Lab BCN talking about Ambient Sensor Kits)

Today students completed their third and final day of an Ecotect Tutorial and have begun site analysis of the Barcelona and Mumbai SuperBlocks they have been assigned for the project. The summer school students in Barcelona spent the afternoon capturing data from their site using an Ambient Sensor Kits (ASKits). ASKits are equipped with GPS antenna, Co2 sensor, light sensor, movement and temperature sensors, that allow to the user to capture and storage data into a memory card, while is scanning the city through paths.  (ASKits at Smart Geometry 2011) Read More »

Today, led by Areti Markopoulou, Director of the IAAC Global School, and Tomas Diez, Project Coordinator for the Fab Lab BCN, IAAC welcomed students participating in the 2011 IAAC Global Summer School, Self<a>rchitecture, for the first day of class. All activities for the day were broadcasted live in Mumbai where students at The Balwant Sheth School of Architecture (BSSA) will be collaborating simultaneously with students in Barcelona. The group working in Barcelona is made up of 20 students from 14 different countries, spanning 5 continents.

On the first day of class, students were introduced to the goals of the project as well as taking part in a workshop using Ecotect.  Over the next two weeks the Summer School will be exploring how information affects the construction of the physical world, and how cities and their built elements can be seen as informational architecture systems. Read More »