Research's IaaC - Students Research - Research Studios

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.”

In architecture, digital design and fabrication tools have given designers unprecedented means for executing formally challenging projects directly from the computer. Yet today, the impact of digital production in architecture goes far beyond the mere production of complex geometries. The ongoing shift towards customisation of computational design methods through the development of scripts and algorithms is causing a fundamental shift in the architectural design process by enabling architects to surpass traditional Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools. By liberating themselves from the creative and technical limitations imposed by software developers and managing their own digital design tools and interfaces with digital fabrication equipment, architects are indeed controlling the design and implementation of specific material solutions.

Just as pre-packaged CAD platforms are being updated or replaced by customised scripting tools, Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) environments and computer-controlled (CNC) fabrication machines will surely undergo a similar shift and be supplanted by more open hardware solutions. Consequently, today’s digital architects ought to formulate more critical positions on the status and characteristics of digital fabrication methods—which are currently being transferred from other disciplines—and begin to investigate the potential of producing highly specific and customised fabrication apparatuses for construction. These new tools will unquestionably open up alternative building techniques and trigger innovative solutions for the production of architecture.

In this context, (FAB)BOTS is a collection of projects that investigate the workflow between computational design and material production methods, through the invention and development of customised numerically-controlled fabrication devices and innovative material solutions. While current applications of digital fabrication focus on optimising efficiency in a laboratory/industrial environment, these projects explore on-site deployment strategies, with solutions that are itinerant, can be adapted to the context and are highly specific in relation to the use of materials.

(FAB)BOTS investigates how design and construction processes can be re-engineered, by becoming independent of the pre-given forms of traditional design-to-fabrication manufacturing processes, mass-produced materials and standardised software packages. Challenging the traditional norms of linear file-to-factory production, these research projects examine scenarios in which material production and fabrication are at the core of a creative parametric design approach. Using a setup consisting of design scripts, machine programming, custom-designed fabrication devices and specific methods of material formation, they illustrate an integrated conception-production logic that enables emergent material configurations which are not guided by a pre-conceived design. Instead, the resulting structures and spatial formations—as demonstrated by the physical prototypes and models—emerge from considering simultaneously machine constraints, material behaviour and specific design performance criteria.

In a broader view, the aim of this research is to speculate on alternative construction technologies for building customised habitats in remote locations or communities that have limited infrastructure and access to new technologies. While traditionally these challenges were addressed using standardised, prefabricated solutions, the use of itinerant fabrication devices promotes a decentralised system of production, which enables highly customised design solutions and fosters the incorporation of other means of economy such as the energy efficiency of the construction process using locally available or easily transportable materials. In this manner, (FAB)BOTS critically addresses the question of architectural production at a time when economy and sustainability must be given very careful consideration.

Note on development and methodology:

The projects in (FAB)BOTS were done by master level students of the MAA programme at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). They were developed in the design studios tutored by Marta Malé-Alemany, in collaboration with Victor Viña. The seven projects were worked on over the course of five months and supported the work through tutorials in programming and building customised robotic devices using the open-source electronics prototyping platform Arduino, which is based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. Student teams were encouraged to benefit from and contribute to a large on-line community by sharing experiences with interactive projects or environments. The electronic and mechanical components of each fabrication and robotic device were produced at the Fab-Lab Bcn (IAAC).

Research Studio III: Digital Tectonics

Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany

Co-Faculty: Victor Viña

Assistant: César Cruz Cázares

Student Team: Joel Letkemann, Viraj Kataria, Fabio Lopez

Research Studio III: Digital Tectonics

Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany

Co-Faculty: Victor Viña

Assistant: César Cruz Cázares

Student team: Natalija Boljsakov, Carlos Naranjo, Brian Miller

Research Studio III: Digital Tectonics

Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany

Co-Faculty: Victor Viña

Assistant: César Cruz Cázares

Student team: Miquel Lloveras, Ali Basbous

Research Studio III: DigitalTectonics

Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany

Co-Faculty: Victor Viña

Assistant: César Cruz Cázares

Student Team: Mia Layco, Georgia Kotsari, Tomasz Starczewski

Research Studio III: Digital Tectonics

Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany

Co-Faculty: Victor Viña

Assistant: César Cruz Cázares

Student Team: Felipe Pecegueiro, Kfir Gluzberg, Jorge Orozco

Research Studio III: Digital Tectonics
Faculty: Marta Male-Alemany
Co-Faculty: Victor Viña
Assistant: César Cruz Cázares
Student team: Melat Assefa, Joao Nuno Palaio Albuquerque, Brian Peters