IAAC BLOG

Team:

Victor Viña

Tomas Diez

Guest Jury:

KX Designers: Katia Glossmann, Xavier Tutó

From IKEA republic to personal fabrication

The processes of industrialization during the last two centuries changed the channels of production and consumption in the modern society. Two extremes have been created from distant relations between production and consumption: on one hand we have the large chains of mass production that have been extended over Asia, Latin America and East Europe (cheap labor), and in the other we have a consumer first world located chiefly in North America and Europe. IKEA, McDonalds, Ford, Toyota, Sony, Nike, Zara, among others, represent the large forces that prompt a model that even seems not to be exhausted (?).

Nevertheless tendencies at the present aims to the personalization of consumption, customers are looking forward to originality and uniqueness, we observe the differentiation of needs between cultures, locations and situations. This phenomena creates new forms of production in which the client becomes the designer and the producer, supported by the advances of digital fabrication technologies and the development of internet through web 2.0 and 3.0. Nike, Adidas, Cannondale are some examples of the inclusion clients in the design of shoes, bicycles or clothes; the Fab Labs prompt the personal fabrication as a model that could radically change the processes and the
relations mentioned before.

This course this oriented to the design, generation and production of an open source and shared platform to promote the online exchange of knowledge, this will permit to prompt the customization and personalization of elements as furniture. The goal is to create an Internet based interface (web 3.0) that will allow to interchange, share, download and upload designs all over the world.

Team: Rodrigo Rubio, Daniel Ibañez
Guest Jury: Luis Falcon (LOAD Office BCN)

After the close distance analysis, during the Rumania trip, with the onsite data, we will change the research scale. The aim of this seminar is to redraw the maps of Rumania in a relational way, constructing the tools to discover and locate the new potentials of the country.
We should build links between the data collected in Rumania and the new data collected from BCN. We will reconstruct, in an abstract way, the whole working systems of Rumania. We will follow, as before, the structure of layers and scales of the HyperHabitat resarch. The seminar will be split in two blocks by scale, in&out. On one hand, we will study at INblock the internal relations produced in the country, following the RWFI structure, locating in these systems the hot points, the potentials (turism fenomena in residential layer for example). On the other hand, we will study at OUTblock the external links (outputs and inputs) produced or needed by the country, locating in this way the critical points of the feedback produced.
Both blocks will be permanently linked by the layers structure of the IaaC HyperHabitat research.

Heads of the Society of Tunis South Lake and the Tunis Urbanism Office visited IaaC to follow the research “Emergence on Med South”.

Med Sud is an investigation into the emergence in the South Mediterranean Sea as an entity that has been exploded and developed in different forms from its north and south. The investigation looks the Mediterranean dimension from different perspectives, looking for the local, regional and global relations that discover a territory that seems to be explored and defined enough, but still there are stronger potentials that open new and emergent opportunities for the sustainable development.

This research is part of the IaaC´s International Exchange program, this year together with the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. The research project is directed by Willy Muller and Fred Guillaud and coordinated by Tomas Diez

Josep Bohigas is an architect based in Poble Nou 22@, Barcelona

In 1991 founded BOPBAA with Francesc Pla and Iñaki Baquero. Their work includes urban design, architecture, ephemeral design, as well as curators of different cultural projects.

This research focuses on the implementation of composite materials in architecture. The construction of 1:1 scale prototypes investigate different processes and techniques: CNC milled moulds, resin transfer moulding, parametric moulds, integration of performative components.

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This is the non-official records of the Romania Trip. From the Air Force One arriving to the NATO meeting at Bucharest to the practice of fishing in the inner city.

IaaC Conference Hall, April 18th

Nader Tehrani received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor in Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and 1986 respectively. He continued his studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he received a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design in 1991. Tehrani attended a post-graduate program in History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. A tenured Associate Professor of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tehrani has also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design.

IaaC Conference Hall, April 17th

Peter Trummer is an architect and researcher. Since 2004 he is studio professor of the second year research program “Associative Design” at the Berlage Institute. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Berlage Institute on the topic of “population thinking in architecture”. He was born in Graz, Austria and obtained his university diploma at the Technical University of Graz in 1994. He moved to Amsterdam in 1995, were he finished his postgraduate study at the Berlage Institute in 1997.He was project architect at UN-Studio and was co-founder of Offshore Architects in 2001. Since 2004, he has own practice. He is invited to lecture, teach, publish and as a critic internationally, including at the Berlage Institute and the Academy of Architecture in Rotterdam, the University of Applied art in Vienna, the AA in London, the Rice University in Houston, Ucla and Sci Arc in Los Angeles.

This Studio was taught during the second term of the MAA 07-08 by Marta Malé-Alemany and José Pedro Sousa, with the assistance of Shane Salisbury and Luis Fraguada.

From a methodological point of view, the studio investigated the impact of digital tec.hnologies for the production of architecture, with a particular focus on the integrated use of parametric design tools and digital fabrication equipment. Participating students were required to enroll in the ‘Parametric Design’ seminar, which provided the conceptual background and necessary skills for developing the project. The studio worked as a research unit, where all the students contributed to a broad research agenda investigating specific themes around the house, by critically identifying opportunities for new developments (i.e. programmatic, geometric, constructive or environmental). Their work was developed and evaluated with the construction of associative parametric models and digitally fabricated prototypes.