Publication's IaaC

THE METÀPOLIS DICTIONARY OF ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE

> Buy

The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture is an enlarged version of the Spanish edition and seeks, as its predecessor, to identify a new architectural will and a new social and cultural panorama. It aims to contribute to forming a vision that is global ­ but not necessarily absolute ­ of what is already showing itself to be a new architectural action, related to that coined as ³advanced culture², present in various art disciplines, thought and technology. It talks about an architecture inscribed in the information society and influenced by the new technologies, the new economy, care of the environment and interest in the individual... The diversity of the authors and the special contributions should be seen as an initial decision aimed at promoting the intersecting and collaboration of visions and proposals along these lines.

> Buy

The “Media House Project” is conceived as a strategic alliance, combining the respective potentialities of the MIT Media Lab and its technological environment, oriented primarily towards developing enabling technologies, and of Metapolis and its creative and artistic environment, oriented towards the design of public and private space. The goal: to put forward proposals for the development of a new interaction between the physical world and the digital world, in order to lay the foundations for a new “art of dwelling”.

Every age has produced a particular way of dwelling as a reflection of technological developments as well as specific social, economic and cultural conditions. The piping of water into the home led to the appearance of the kitchen and the bathroom; artificial light and electricity resulted in new forms of domestic organization; household appliances allowed people to conserve food for longer periods and to do more in less time, and TV turned the traditional living room into a window onto a world dominated by the mass media. In our own time, the new technologies of information and communications are transforming the home into a micro-city, a genuinely multifunctional environment (complete with work, shopping, leisure, and rest) from which to inhabit the global village.

Within a few years, the passive physical world defined by purely functional structures which give people shelter, and in which we consume products and interact with the world by way of screens, will be rendered obsolete by intelligent environments in which everyone and everything (people, objects, spaces) will both generate and consume information and, ideally, transform it into knowledge. Architecture, which organizes human activity by means of the construction of space, has the potential to play a key role in this new, hybrid situation by redefining itself as an interface for interaction.

As such, the design of both physical space and digital space will increasingly have to take place at the same time, in a process of constant feedback in which both worlds learn from each other's and their own potentialities and limitations. Matter and information will intersect in activity.

The knowledge society will develop a home geared towards the creation and representation of knowledge, in which the individual, the citizen in relation with other citizens around the world, can live a life of improved quality.

This project promotes the creation of environments that are less technologically cluttered, more beautiful and more meaningful, that help people shape their environments and connect to others.

The Media House will not be “a house with a computer”; instead, the house will be the computer. As Neil Gershenfeld says, architecture will never be inert again.

Vicente Guallart

1ST ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE CONTEST

> Buy

Created for students and professionals to inspire changes in how new buildings are designed and constructed, the Self-Sufficient competition challenged participants to design a self-sufficient and ecologically oriented dwelling. In the early 20th century, the concept of “dwelling” was defined as a “machine for living”, a reference to a new way of understanding the construction of inhabitable spaces that characterized the Machine Age. Today, a century later, we face the challenge of constructing a sustainable or self-sufficient dwelling, a living organism that interacts with its environment, exchanging resources, and which functions as an entirely independent entity. The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) has collected a selection of entries presented during its 1st Advanced Architecture Contest: Self-Sufficient Housing.

PROTOTYPE OF URBANITY.

From an entire block to a single foodstand Taipei shows the different scales of the dynamics of XXI’s century city. A multiple layerment of mobility constructs an unique grid in its core.

400x400m superblocks functioning as a solid structure with a big scale of activities, transportation and buildings in its peripheria, building up a typical orthogonal grid which becomes a flexible one
inside of it: small alleys with smaller uses functioning as a residential neighborhood just a few meters far from the metropolitan city. These superblocks are one of the expressions of what Taipei means: dynamics, flexibility and mobility, big masses changing during the time allowing multiple activities to happen: night markets, weekend markets and day markets inhabiting streets and infrastructures.

The Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC) directed by Vicente Guallart in collaboration with The Observer Design Group directed by JM Lin, started in 2006 this research work with the students of the 2005-2006 master of advanced architecture, 10 days at Taipei measuring and reading the city in order to get the primary information for the following workshop at Barcelona; this publication is the result of the entire research. IaaC wants to map cities over the world to have a picture of this moment of the history of urbanism and architecture development that will allow to understand what our cities are, how they are functioning and whose are the possible facts that will lead urbanity on the future.

The publication of this book will be on charge of Actar Publications and will be released on march 2007.

HIPERCATALUNYA : TERRITORIS DE RECERCA

> Buy

HiperCatalunya is a territorial analysis and research project promoted by the Government of Catalonia, directed by Metàpolis and undertaken at the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaaC). In an advanced prospecting of today¹s territory, HiperCatalunya seeks to import tomorrow¹s potentials. to interrogate the territory to bring out its capacities and latencies. Beyond the traditional mechanisms of territorial analysis, this group endeavour attempts to identify and express a multidisciplinary approach to our environment, encouraging interpretations open to potential interaction between the existing and the imaginable, in accordance with an innovative dimension of contemporary culture tending of foster new spaces for new ways of life, but also new logics and new aesthetics for new escenarios of progress. With this purpose in mind, the work carried out has generated a wide range of research projects and materials intended for the understanding of specialists and the general public alike. HiperCatalunya is a reflection, and seeks to stimulate reflection, on the true territorial dimension of Catalonia, establishing through theoretical and practical approaches four main realms of analysis, reflection and proposal, understood as operative frameworks as well as strategic layers of action, aimed at anticipating and visualizing possible key questions in the future development of the territory.

TERRITORIAL LOOPS

> Buy

This book sets out to follow the tradition of charting or map-making as the capturing of visual records of a territory in transformation, where the force of the urban seems to presage imminent transformations is its environment. The images present in panoramic format a key moment in the transformation of Barcelona at the start of the last century.

Jaime Lerner

> Buy

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia has published in Spanish 'Urban Acupuncture’ of the Brazilian Jaime Lerner, a book in which the author reflects on the problems of urbanism and the society.

Lerner, president of the Union Internacional de Arquitectos (UIA), gathers in the book incidents and anecdotes happened in different cities and times through its acute glance.

The work supposes a warning on the capacity of society to transform the places in which lives and a reflection so that the things that cause cities to exist continue renewed and improved and on the necessary tools to treat a city.

In the introduction of the book, Lerner asks "why certain cities obtain important and positive transformations", to which he responds that "in them a beginning was caused, an awakening (...) a good acupuncture. True urban acupuncture ".

Jaime Lerner (Curitiba, 1937) is a city planning and an architect and and was during three legislatures Mayor of his native city. He has gained diverse prizes in Brazil and the rest of the world, doctor ' honoris causa ‘ by University of Cracovia and president of UIA from 2002.

Jose Miguel G. Cortes

> Buy

This book tries to register the debates (motivated by cultural studies) that question the hegemonic sense of urban space and the configuration of the cities, understood these as an accumulation of uses, perceptions, symbolic systems, elements of representation..., and which relevance modifies in time, culture, social groups, sexual relations or gender behaviour.

The complex relations between buildings and bodies, structures and genders, surroundings and relations, have characterized the attempts to undermine the conventions of the traditional architecture in these last decades. Nevertheless, the contemporary city, more and more, establishes attitudes and ways of performance with which organizes and structures the control of desires of the body by two means: one, the creation of "docile spaces" easy to watch and to control; and two, trying to obtain "absent bodies" or denied so that pleasure and desires disappear of public spaces.

Jose Miguel iribas

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia has made a territorial study of Albacete as a potential territorial hub, one of the key cities to obtain a balanced territorial joint of the South quadrant, that is, as well, determinant in the future of Spain. This study was directed by the Sociologist Jose Miguel Iribas with the collaboration of Iaac researchers Rodrigo Rubio, Daniel Ibañez, Yesenia Conchucos and Juliet Zindrou.

The study concretes in a territorial analysis, where a privileged situation is detected in cities like Zaragoza, Ciudad Real or Albacete, that generates an intermediate crown between the centre (Madrid) and the cities of the coast, and that have a very relevant articulating roll, as well as diverse key factors for the balanced urban development of Albacete.

The other part of the study is centred in marking the proposals bases for Albacete’s growth. Proposals from the new station A.V.E to the new logistic platform, the technological park Eurocopter, proposals for power supplying with new technologies based on hydrogenate, proposals of eco-tourism in Vega de Jucar or new locations for residential habitats development... .

This territorial research, formalizes in a exhibition that will take place in Albacete in the month of February 2007 and that will be exposed in the book `The Albacete effect´.