Lecture's IaaC

Marcos Cruz

Lecture: Neoplasmatic Design

Marcos Cruz is the Director of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is also a Reader and Studio Master of Diploma/MArch Unit 20. His varied teaching activity has been carried out at University College London and University of Westminster in London, University of California Los Angeles, Tunghai University and Feng Chia University in Taiwan, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen, among others. Cruz studied at the Escola Superior Artística do Porto – ESAP (1997). In London he gained a master’s degree with distinction in Architectural Design at the Bartlett (1999) and got a PhD (2007). His investigations about Neoplasmatic Architecture, focused on a contemporary discussion about the body and the impact of bio-technology on architecture, won the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis (2008). Cruz founded with Marjan Colletti the atelier marcosandmarjan in 2000, combining the practice and teaching of architecture, along with experimental design research. The work has been extensively published and exhibited. This includes the participation in the Venice Biennale (2004) and the solo exhibition Interfaces/Intrafaces at the iCP Hamburg and TU Braunschweig (2005/06). Apart from numerous exhibition installations, they built two pavilions and worked on a large entertainment complex in Beijing. 

Achim Menges

Lecture: Material Computation in Architecture

Computation, in its most basic meaning, refers to the processing of information. In this way, both machinic processes operating in the binary realm of the digital, as well as material processes operating in the complex domain of the physical can be considered computational. The lecture will introduce Achim Menges’ work on exploring the territory where machine computation and material computation potentially overlap, where they not simply co-exist but intensely interact in the design process. He will present the related design research - conducted at the Architectural Association, at Harvard University and at his new institute at the University of Stuttgart University over the last ten years - along a series of constructed prototype buildings. This will include the institute’s latest research pavilion, which was entirely constructed by robotic carbon and glass fibre filament winding processes.

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Achim Menges, born 1975, is a registered architect and professor at University of Stuttgart where he is the founding director of the Institute for Computational Design (since 2008).  In addition, he has been Visiting Professor in Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (2009-10), at the AA School of Architecture in London (2009-current) and at Rice University in Houston (2004). Achim Menges graduated with honours from the AA School of Architecture in London (2002) where he subsequently taught as Studio Master of the Emergent Technologies and Design Graduate Program (2002-09) and as Unit Master of Diploma Unit 4 (2003-06).

Achim Menges practice and research focuses on the development of integral design processes at the intersection of morphogenetic design computation, biomimetic engineering and computer aided manufacturing that enables a highly articulated, performative built environment. His work is based on an interdisciplinary approach in collaboration with structural engineers, computer scientists, material scientists and biologists. Achim Menges has published several books on this work and related fields of design research, and he is the author/coauthor of numerous articles and scientific papers.  His projects and design research has received many international awards, has been published and exhibited worldwide, and form parts of several renowned museum collections.

Enrico Dini

Lecture: D-Shape: Petrified Algorithms

Enrico Dini is an Italian civil engineer who spent most of his career in automation and robotics for the footwear industry.

Since the late 90's Enrico came into contact with rapid prototyping techniques used to facilitate the design of the shoes.

In 2003, while he was 3D printing a shoe sole, Enrico had a vision of this technique applied on a large scale and imagined a new free form architecture. Enrico decided to return to its original skill enriched by his experience in robotics and since then has devoted his life to developing a new construction technique based on the principles of stereolitograpy. In 2007 helped from his trusted brother Riccardo, Enrico tested successfully his large scale D-Shape printer prototype and the following year he printed the Radiolaria, the first free-form building structure ever. Today Enrico Dini is immersed in developing D-Shape, 3D Printing Building technology to bring innovation to the architecture and construction industries.

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3D Printing applied to a large scale is a new Construction Science.

The pages of this book are all blank and need to be written from scratch.

Building through 3D Printing means : a new machine; but, what embodiment? how big? How tall? How fast? How accurate? 

A new process using new materials or old materials in a new way, but what binders? what fibers? what additives? What methods to achieve structural performance?

A new Building technique :  just one?  Maybe many? Which should be adopted first?

But the biggest question is : what should be done with the 3D printer, a new tool for a new architectural language? what to print? what to sell? How to design?

Freedom of Creation:

Is it really true? What are the constraints? How to solve practical matters? Printing on site or off site?

Enrico Dini has spent the past seven years facing hundreds of questions and answering roughly just a few of them.

During his lecture Enrico will explain the story of a challenging, painful, exciting invention process, still on going and full of surprises, mistakes and discoveries.

He found his way: mimicking nature.

Stefano Boeri

Lecture: Mar Adentro

Stefano Boeri, born in 1956, is a Milan-based architect and founder of “Stefano Boeri Architetti”. From 2011 to 2013 he has been Councillor for Culture, Design and Fashion for the Municipality of Milan. From 2004 to 2007 he was editor in chief of Domus international magazine. From 2007 to 2011 he was editor in chief of the international magazine Abitare. Professor of Urban Design at the Politecnico di Milano, he has taught as visiting professor at Harvard GSD, MIT and Berlage Institute among others. He is the founder of Multiplicity international research network dedicated to the study of contemporary urban transformations. Co-author of different volumes such as Mutations (Actar, 2000), USE (Skirà, 2002) and Cronache del Abitare (Mondadori, 2007), Biomilano (Corraini, 2011) and author of Anticittà (Laterza, 2011). Stefano Boeri, with his texts and reflections, is a regular contributor to several magazines and newspapers. Together with Burdett, Herzog and MacDonough, Boeri was part of the Architecture Advisory Board in charge of developing the guidelines for the urban transformations to be implemented within the frame of the 2015 Milan Architecture Expo.

Marie-Ange Brayer

Lecture: Naturalizing Architecture

ArchiLab, the international laboratory of architecture, was created in 1999 by Marie-Ange Brayer and Frederic Migayrou in Orleans, France. ArchiLab presents the conceptual and pragmatic transformations taking place in the field of architecture. It is a leading international event for bringing the young generation of architects engaged in research and experimentation.

In 1999, the first edition of ArchiLab explored the paradigm shift brought by the emergence of digital technologies within the newly emerging computational space. The next edition which will take place in September will be dedicated to the interactions between digital architecture and life sciences (biotechnology, neurosciences, genetics, etc).

Today, the utilization of a new generation of software programs for designing architecture, along with techniques that make organic simulation possible, is enabling architects to explore the specific principles of evolution on the living realm with increasing precision. The same processes now revolutionizing the scientific disciplines, architecture, art and design, are being used by designers to achieve ever greater degrees of complexity. They are also bringing about a profound mutation in the very concept of nature.

This lecture will illustrate this ongoing dialogue between architecture and the sciences within the computational field. 

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Since 1996, Marie-Ange Brayer has been director of the Centre Regional Contemporary Art Collection [FRAC, Centre] in Orléans, France, where the collection is channelled towards the linkage between art and research architecture. The FRAC Centre has been putting together a collection to do with architecture in its utopian and experimental dimension, from the 1950s up until the present day. In 1999 she founded with Frédéric Migayrou the Orléans International Architectural Conference, ArchiLab, which brings together younger international practitioners involved in the latest forms of architecture.

In 2002, M.-A. Brayer was appointed with Béatrice Simonot as curator of the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture’s 8th International Exhibition of Architecture. In 2008, she was associate curator of the 3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIAC) for the “Youniverse” exhibition, with Peter Weibel as general curator. In 2013, she will curate ArchiLab « Naturalizing the architecture » with Frederic Migayrou. Art and architecture critic, Marie-Ange Brayer has published numerous articles in her domain in magazines and catalogs .She is currently working on a doctorate treating the architectural model since the Renaissance by tracing the history of its representation at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris.

Bill Hillier

Lecture: Spatial sustainability in cities: or, do cities really have neighbourhoods?

The complexity of cities is such that, historically, they have defied our ability to describe them. Since city planning as a conscious discipline made such descriptions necessary, we have approximated them with simplifications, typically using notions which make the city seem to be more orderly than it is - most notoriously, the idea that cities are made up of a cellular pattern of spatially distinct neighbourhoods, with separate linkages to each other, rather than being, spatially speaking, continuous wholes. Can we do better ?Can we learn to describe cities as the continuous structures they seem to be, while saving the idea that different areas have different spatial and functional characters ? Space syntax argues, that by developing methods of analysis which characterise the city’s street network as a spatial configuration, the city can produce its own descriptions of its structure, which we can then test by correlating it with observed function. By such a conjecture-test procedure, space syntax has arrived at a new global definition of the city as a foreground network of linked centres at all scales set into a background network of residential space, each with its own distinctive geometric and metric properties. But what about the neighbourhoods that make up the city. Here we show that space syntax analysis brings to light not a cellular pattern of distinct neighbourhoods, but what we call a multi-scale periodic patchwork formed by spatial differences from one area to the next. To some extent the patches can be shown to approximate named areas, but much more convincingly, they seem to reflect the duality of economic and culturing functioning that governs the spatial structure of the city as a whole, but through morphological discontinuities from one area to the next rather than well-defined neighbourhood boundaries. It is how they are connected, not disconnected, that creates the distinctive character of urban areas.

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Bill Hillier is Professor of Architectural and Urban Morphology in the University of London, Chairman of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory in University College London and a director of Space Syntax Limited. He was the pioneer of ‘space syntax’ in the nineteen seventies, and authored The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1990) with Julienne Hanson, Space is the Machine’ (CUP 1996), and over a hundred and fifty publications on space and other aspects of architectural and urban theory. Current research interests are in space syntax as a theory of the city, the relation between cities and urban societies, the syntax of generative buildings, the links between objective spatial laws and spatial cognition, the aesthetics of space, and the space syntax paradigm as a philosophical position.

Enrique Walker

 Lecture: The Dictionary of Received Ideas

The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a decade-long project (2006—) whose aim is to examine received ideas—in other words, ideas which have been depleted of their original intensity due to recurrent use—in contemporary architecture culture. Based on Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished project, Le dictionnaire des idées reçues, this ongoing series of design studios and theory seminars proposes to disclose, define, and date—and in the long run archive—received ideas prevalent over the past decade, both in the professional and the academic realm, in order to ultimately open up otherwise precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory. 

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Enrique Walker is an architect and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, where he also directs the Master of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design. His publications include, Tschumi on Architecture: Conversations with Enrique Walker (Monacelli, 2006) and Lo Ordinario (Gustavo Gili, 2010).

Alejandro Tamayo

Lecture: Technology: Between Magic and Everyday Life 

During the talk he will be sharing a selection of past and current projects that present different approaches in his relationship to technology, from developing a laboratory to create a fruit computer, making visible the human rhythms of birth and death, to his must recent radioastronomical art works that react in real time to solar explosions.

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Alejandro Tamayo is an artist, researcher and teacher working in the intersections between artistic practice, science, technology and everyday life. He has been a tutor at Medialab Prado interactivos? workshops including Technologies of Laughter (Mexico) and Neighborhood Science (Madrid) and has teaching for over eight years at various art and design schools in Colombia including the Art Department from Los Andes University and the School of Fine Arts from the National University. He has been a guest speaker in various venues including Pixelache University-Reinventing the Teaching Situation (Helsinki), CIANT gallery (Prague), and the International Image Festival (Colombia).

Caroline Bos

Lecture: On the Verge

Caroline Bos studied History of Art at Birkbeck College of the University of London and Urban and Regional Planning at the Faculty of Geosciences, University of Utrecht. In 1988 she co- founded Van Berkel & Bos Architectuurbureau with the architect Ben van Berkel, extending her theoretical and writing projects to the practice of architecture. Realized projects include the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen and the Moebius house.

In 1998 Caroline Bos co-founded UNStudio (United Net). UNStudio presents itself as a network of specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure. Current urban development projects include the restructuring of the station area of Arnhem, the mixed-use Raffles City in Hangzhou, a masterplan for Basauri, and the design and restructuring of the Harbour Ponte Parodi in Genoa.

Caroline Bos has taught as a guest lecturer at Princeton University, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Academy of Architecture in Arnhem. In 2012 she was awarded an Honorary Professorship at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. Central to her teaching is the inclusive approach of architectural works integrating virtual and material organization and engineering constructions.

Enric Ruiz Geli

Lecture: It's all about particles

ENRG is the architect of VillaNurbs, Media-ICT, El Bulli Foundation, the Millenium Project, VillaBio.
His Project Hotel Forest belongs to the MoMA collection.
His project New York Aquarium Project belongs to the FRAC collection.
The Media-ICT has been awarded "The Best Building of the Year 2011", by WAF.
Media-ICT is a Net Zero Building , built at a construction market cost of 1.300 €/m2.
ENRG has created 6 patents, around the living lab VillaNurbs, from 2002, until 2011, as a master piece of Digital Fabrication.
ENRG has Lectures and relationship with a map of Labs such as IAAC, Angewandte, AA, UCLA, Passadena Art Center, CITA, RMIT, MIT, Bartlett, ETHZ, IE School of Architecture among others.
Cloud 9 agenda is to look at PILOT Projects in Global Warming Scenarios.
ENRG is master unit at the AA, where he focuses on this global warming scenarios research towards a green agenda.
ENRG is director of the Self-Sufficient Building Research Studio, within the Master in Advanced Architecture at IAAC.

Cloud 9 has signed "knowledge contracts" to transfer the Media-ICT knowledge in: Taipei, Kuwait, Moscou and the OECS.
ENRG belongs to the Advisory Comitee of Tecnalia.
ENRG belongs to the design team lead by Jeremy Rifkin, to develop the TIR in cities.
ENRG and Ferran Adria are creating el Bulli Foundation as a living laboratory in Cap de Creus.
ENRG has lead the Millennium Project in Valladolid, with an urban retrofitting Project using for the first time 10 urban wind turbines.