Research's IaaC - Students Research -

Programme: MAA - Master in Advanced Architecture 2010-2011
Research Line: Digital Tectonics

Students group: Antonio Atripaldi, Cesar Andrés Briceño Guttierez, Ayber Gulfer, Mani Khosrovani

Project description: The research explores the possibility to inject a binding material into sand, using capillarity as the main parameter to emerge a potential new morphological system out of this ancient building material. 

The groups intention is to explore injection, using sand not only as a mold, but as a medium to generate forms that are being shaped by controlling the absorption of the binding material into the sand.

The project is about continuoous relqationship between solids, fluids and empty spaces.

MAA Students:  Jose Alfredo Guerro Mora (Mexico), Katerina Inepologlou (Greece), Panagiota Banioti (Greece)

Research Studio: Emergent Territories

Studio Instructor: Willy Müller, MAA Co-Director

Student Summary:

SYMBIOSIS

The existent city order clearly separates our buildings and pedestrians from the high speed mobility systems (Highway). These act as two separate layers that require  independent space from one another, and as the city grows, this only leads to a larger miscommunication between the two layers. We confront a design phase of our city in which we must rethink space as “sharing of space” for different layers within “time”. Then comes the question of How can live information help us establish rules for the happenings of our city? and how can this be more efficient?

Symbiosis is an adaptive road and space distribution system that is flexible in the 3D and time axes. It proposes a new “changing” urban section prototype in which mobility and space flows are determined by live information of the city (vehicular traffic and people flows). This is achieved by collecting real time information through the use of sensors. In Symbiosis, the current mobility items are rethought, then replaced by prints of light and texture. These prints are visualized and change in time. The system optimizes space according to what is needed in terms of road space and people space.

Programme: MAA - Master in Advanced Architecture 2010-2011
Research Line: Digital Tectonics

Students group: Amay Gurkar, Harshad Sutar, Saiqa Iqbal , Vittal Sridharan 

Project description: Recycled FaBric(k) is a project targeting recently demolished sites or disaster hit areas and re-instating the site-found broken bricks as potent design components. The project utilizes the atypical geometry of broken bricks towards researching on possible emergent forms. The resultant is an emergent outcome of user-controlled design inputs & inherent properties of the bricks. The project establishes a site based active design system with a real-time interaction between the design and execution alternate to the conventional office-site interaction making the design process versatile and holistic.

Recycled FaBric(k) collaborates with various autonomous technologies to analyse the design possibilities with these geometries. The broken bricks are reproduced into a digital platform, given an identification tag, analysed of all its properties, sorted and the design outcome is evaluated. The project further creates an interaction platform wherein the tags cross-check the positioning of the sorted bricks in accordance with the design. This opens up an opportunity for the designer to not only verify the execution process in real-time but also to re-evaluate the design in case of a change. This re-evaluated design is communicated via a wireless device thus continuing the active interaction between the execution team and designer all throughout the construction process. The project is conceived as a portable design system which can be executed at any site immediately

Recycled FaBric(k) can easily calculate the energy , manpower requirements as well as resource management thus forming a sustainable and efficient design system..10

The objective of the project is to transform one Cerda Block of Barcelona into a Self Sufficient Block.

The main concepts for developing the block were to free the ground level, create an underground patio and use it as a public green space in order to connect and give back interactive spaces to the city.

Organizing the different programs according to better location and connecting them through a green loop that will serve for vertical farming. The inverted topography and the courtyards of the building will work as structure, vertical circulation and fluid system for sustainable elements, it also becomes the skin of the building.

This metabolic structure will serve to harvest water to produce energy, clean grey water for farming and public green areas, waste management, geothermal system and solar photovoltaic panels on south side of the block were it can take advantage of the most of radiation.

Fab Academy 2011 Project: Data Tree_Sensor Bricks
Areti Markopoulou

This Fab Academy project was created for implementation at Can Valldaura, the site of the future Green Fab Lab, located in Collserola Park just outside of Barcelona.

The project features artificial fruit that cling to trees containing sensors that monitor moisture, light, and temperature as well as smoke detectors. The fruit sends data wirelessly, via a radio frequency antenna, to a data processing apparatus at the Can Valldaura house. From here the data is uploaded and processed in Pachube which gives a real-time visualization of the environmental conditions around each tree in relation to time and position.

This test data can be found on the Green Fab Lab website.

More information about the entire production process can be found here.

This is open source project. All information from the project (files, materials, programming codes, circuit sensor boards) can be found and downloaded here.

The MTM project is part of the research developed at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT and the global network of Fab Labs. The Fab Lab Barcelona is making this year the MTM-SNAP project, preceded by the Mantis 9 milling machine developed las year in the Fab Academy program. This is a road map to the Fab Labs v2.0, a Fab Lab that could reproduce itself, being able of fabricate the machines needed to make another machines, and reducing the costs 5-10 times.

Urban Feeds is a project developed at Smart Geometry 2011 in Copenhagen.  The project has been developed at the Fab Lab Barcelona, based on the Personal Data Collection, through the use of the ASKits (Ambient Sensing Kit) devices, previously developed by LaN and upgraded for the workshop. Any person, anywhere, could produce its own devices to sense and quantify those variables that are surrounding us, that affect our behavior and the way we inhabit our world. Centralized data sources offers a top to bottom approach to the values of our environment, by developing the ASKits, the aim is to get a closer look into our immediate environment, from Static Kits installed in houses to personal kits embedded into our SmartPhones.

The project has been based on the use of the Arduino platform, and different shields and sensor units for data capturing. At the moment is evolving to the use of FabDuinos, being able to be produced entirely in a Fab Lab.

UF SG2011 Team: Elsa Wifstrand, Federico Giacomarra, Dimitris Papadopoulous, Wo Jae Sung, Bernadette Luger, Scott Leinweber, Olivier Gras, Felipe Pecegueiro, Luis Fraguada, Morten Bulow, Tomas Diez

MAA Students: : Siddhesh Kale (India), Laura Molina Araujo (Dominican Republic), Marziah Rajabzadeh (Iran)

Research Studio: Emergent Territories

Studio Instructor: Willy Müller, MAA Co-Director

Student Summary:

Moll de La Fusta:

1_ Begins at the Placa de Colom, where the touristic ‘La Rambla’ ends

2_ Ronda del Litoral passes through the center of the site

3_ Adjacent to Barcelona harbor

The many over ground lanes create a horizontal obstacle for pedestrian passage to the waterfront. The Ronda -even as it passes below ground level, creates vertical disconnection by forcing pedestrians to make many height changes before reaching relative proximity to the water.

A visual and psychological connection to the waterfront can only be achieved by physical proximity to the water. This, and accessibility issues have compressed all activities within 5 meters of the harbor border. Lack of organization and amenities further limit social programs in the site.

The amount of existing green space in Barcelona is a mere 10.2% or approximately 18 square meters per capita. Furthermore, this green space is not evenly divided throughout the city area (i.e. a high percentage is concentrated in Montjuic park) and as a result is often a great distance for habitants to travel to.

1_ the ronda solution

2_ the public access solution

3_solving the connectivity

The initial step to confront the site’s disuse was to identify and strengthen the points of access to the site, by infusing them with activity and an inviting atmosphere, we hoped to better integrate the city into the site. This is the first intervention; the intervention of the roads.

While the Ronda maintains it’s initial physical location within the site, it is more integrated and connected to the actuality of the waterfront. The Ronda is exposed within glass tube to create a visual connection without any sound pollution. Pedestrians enter the site adjacent to the Ronda and gradually walk above and beyond it, giving the vehicles a chance to be part of the site too.

Interactive_1

Through the interaction of water and the planes within the site we hope to better reconnect the city with the waterfront, introducing a new relationship with the sea.

Interactive_2

Through the interaction of people with the digital world which is reflected upon various intelligent surfaces upon the planes we hoped to create greater digital connectivity with other parts of Barcelona and the world.

MAA Students: Miguel Guerrero (Spain), Natasa Pistofidou (Greece), Carolina Miro (Spain), Chryssa Karakana (Greece)

Research Studio: Digital Tectonics

Studio Instructor: Marta Malé-Alemany, MAA Co-Director

Student’s Summary:

“Earth´s abundance of sand and the critically self-organizing nature of granular materials were the inspiration of this research. To this day sand has predominantly been used in construction as a primer material as well as in sand casting moulds. The aim of the project is to numerically control the process of sand pile formation and solidification, through manual and digital design and experimentation.

The procedure involves a machine that collects and then directly deposits the sand found on site, rearranging the environment into a configuration of piles and cavities. This simple process ensures that the building material does not need to be transported to the site and only needs to be carried by the machine momentarily. The liquid binder that is introduced to solidify the surface produces a wide variety of structures that are related to the binder properties (viscosity, time, density, deposition trajectory).

The fabrication process of the project is bound to specific environmental conditions of the site into which it could be integrated and possible architectural applications lie in the creation of desert rails, provisional structures for tsunami situations or alternatively laboratorial production of components.”