Event's IaaC - IAACs 10th Anniversary

Dear Friends,

On March 2, 2011, the IAAC academic programme will be ten years old.
 
In 2001 a group of Barcelona architects and experts from a variety of disciplines got together to create a new space in which to foster innovation in architecture and the construction of the city, on the basis of new premises extrapolated from the then emerging information society.
 
Ten years on, more than 400 students from fifty countries are members of the IAAC Community, having benefited from their transformative experience in Barcelona and their interaction with the city, the faculty and their peers — an experience which in many cases has been crucial to their professional development.
 
In the IAAC Master’s we have developed outstanding projects such as the Media House, Sociopolis, Hypercatalunya, Hyperhabitat and the Fab Lab House, produced diverse publications such as the Dictionary of Advanced Architecture with Actar, organized the Self-sufficient Cities competitions, carried out research in Brazil, Croatia, Taiwan, Romania, Tunisia and India, taken part in the Venice Biennial and the Solar Decathlon, constructed prototypes in the Fab Lab and imagined how to promote new paradigms in architecture and the human habitat. IAAC has also held advanced architecture competitions and created exhibitions such as the Fabrication Laboratory in Design Hub BCN.
 
This year, 2011, IAAC is initiating the Valldaura project, with which we will launch the Green Fab Lab in Barcelona’s Collserola metropolitan park, which will be open to host IAAC Alumni, a structure conceived with a view to making our community an active and dynamic environment in which to launch new projects.
 
I want to thank you all for your support — for all you have given us, in good times and not so good times. Thanks, then, to all of our students and researchers, all of the teachers and speakers who have shared their knowledge with us in workshops, studios and lectures, all of the visiting schools and all of the institutions and companies that have supported us, especially the Foundation of the UPC Polytechnic University of Catalonia, our partners since the very first day.
 
IAAC is — and we want it to keep on being — SMALL, INDEPENDENT AND GLOBAL.
 
I want to express my appreciation to all of the co-directors of our academic programmes, notably Willy Müller, Marta Malé-Alemany, Manuel Gausa and Artur Serra, to the coordinators, and to the chairs of the board — Felip Puig, Robert Brufau, Francesc Fernandez and, currently, Javier Nieto — and to all of the members of the board and the scientific committee.
 
On the 2^nd of March 2001 we began this adventure with Neil Gershenfeld, via videoconference from MIT. Ten years later, our links with universities and schools around the world are becoming ever stronger and opening up new spaces for innovation.
 
Among other projects for the coming months we are preparing a book, IAAC, from 10 to 100, in which we will look at the future of our discipline.
 


Vicente Guallart
Director, IAAC