Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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4.3.2 IaaC Advanced Architecture Contests Lucas Cappelli
IaaC Advanced Architecture Contest
IaaC Advanced Architecture Contests are an anual set of competitions organised by IaaC and lead by Lucas Cappelli. Its aim is to promote discussion and research in order to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the 21st-century city and habitat will be like. These competitions are open to architects, enginners, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing proposals capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information, technology, architecture, and urban planning, with the purpose of balancing the possible impact of realtime data collection on sensor-driven cities. Usually the competition jury is composed of architectes, experts form a wide range of fields and directors of some of the world’s foremost architecture schools, were looking for outstanding proposals of any scale, for any city in the world. This IaaC-Bit presents some of the best projects presented in the first 4 editions of this contest, along with some writtings produced by its director, Lucas Cappelli. In these texts, Lucas explains in a narrative way the main paradigmas that are leading the contests, and above all is detecting and bringing to discussion some of the most contemporaneous topics related to architecture and society in general.
Advanced Knowledge
With the internet, a horizontal technology that lays the foundations of information and communicating, we are dealing with a society that has the autonomous capacity for cultural creation marked by an increasing dissolution of preexisting systems of bureaucratic control. This “flat technology”, one free of specialization, without barriers of assimilation, offers new mechanisms that enable the absorption of information, which serve as a means of reaching solutions that become the base for the generation of new knowledge. While traditional forms of knowledge production address and solve problems in a context governed by the interests of a specific community and is disciplinary, (both homogeneous and hierarchical) this new form develops in a context of application: it is transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, flexible, transitory, socially responsible and reflective. Cover - Reciprocity, IaaC Archive Figure 1 - Ocean Core, IaaC Archive 2
This is the birth of a new form of knowledge production that includes a larger body of practitioners, ephemeral but linked in time, heterogeneous but interconnected, all working on a specific, delimited issue. The scope of this issue also presumes the application of a transdisciplinary approach, since the resolution of these difficulties reaches beyond the individual discipline that constitutes them, placing discoveries beyond the confines of a single specific order and removing the need for a validating point of reference.
Figure 2 FFD, designed for Milan EXPO 2015, explores how digital technology can change the way that people interact with food. 4
Architecture in Our Hands
If a system were implemented to share architectures for the local construction or houses using new technologies, we might suddenly find an individual downloading a free program that enabled them to manufacture and construct a house, with predetermined parts made of local materials, adapting it to their own requirements and personalising it right down to the last detail. The idea of solving such a widespread basic social problem as housing using global knowledge, shared experiences and the resolution of similar problems in very different places might well be addressed by harnessing the new communication and technology systems in conjunction with the notion of personal manufacturing. At a glance, it certainly appears that selfsufficient models of this kind could well be the longawaited solution to what we architects have been mulling over for some time: a model enabling the ego to be excluded as an end in our discipline, to finally escape from the narcissistic circle in which we have trapped ourselves in recent years, giving free rein to our boundless vanity. The selffab house is, in essence, merely an excuse; it is yet another martyr to the generation of knowledge. It represents generosity, the suicidal capitulation of the architect, our infinite surrender, the understanding that for architecture to serve its deepest intention, the star architect has to disappear; the superfluous, the artificial, the annihilating effect of the superimposed, of the infamous, the unnecessary and the pornographic exposition of egoistic desires has to die. Only Architecture should remain. The modernists had the courage to mentions this. Houses are habitation machines. Buildings should represent their users in every dimension, be their reflection or counterreflection, their truths and their lies, but it is the inhabitants themselves that need to reflect all of this. We no longer want to talk about paradigms in architecture; it is now, still without credentials, that we step across the border from the real into the whole world, where space might receive its deserved extent, its perfect mould and its longawaited and muchtalkedof response. Our soul mate could be here; we could inhabit it, stretch out our arm and open a door. It is now that my window takes the form of my ears because I prefer to hear and not see. It is a historic moment; it is time to make sacrifices and to make room for the architecture of the people. And to become true architects. Figure 2 - IaaC Advanced Contest 5th Edition, Iaac Archive Figure 3 - IaaC Advanced Contest 5th Edition, Iaac Archive Figure 4 - IaaC Advanced Contest 5th Edition, Iaac Archive
An Open New Landscape
From the window of the plane I can see large expanses of parcelled land. My flight takes two hours, and except for a few mountains, the entire territory along my route is broken up and divided into regular geometries like colour palettes of varying size stretching out along the roads. The whole planet, classified, catalogued, divided up as in a great freefor all. We live in this glutted place, where deserted islands and unclaimed land no longer exist. We live in a physical world that is not ours, which is owned by someone else because one day we decided that nature could not belong to all. But today a new world, a new “digital” dimension is taking shape. And some people have proposed carving it up and parcelling it out in the same way. Of course the generation that is creating and transforming this new space no longer perceives its realities as property nor builds fences in order to draw borders, but rather has a much more conciliatory and unifying vision of the creative processes. We no longer need to own something in order to use it, just as we don’t need to own the air in order to breathe; the new creators offer shared and open systems and in return only ask that we use them, that we appropriate what is ours. The new digital world faces the challenge of remaining open and unlimited, something the old landowners couldn’t conceive of in a civilized world because the previous civilizations didn’t understand what we are now
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able to understand: that we have more when we let things flow and don’t try to appropriate them for ourselves; that in giving we receive much more and create a higher level of consciousness, one which engenders participation and empathy. We could say that in certain manner open source software is invading our hardware t he physical structure of our societyÂto release it definitely from an outdated model. Different system platforms and devices to measure and manage different aspects of our cities will have a direct impact on their future configuration. The superimposition of this new layer of information on the physical space will make it possible to free up the space in order to enable a new concept of the share city, bending the physical world to the actual wishes of its occupants, responding directly to their demands, transforming itself according to their needs. On the other hand, the gap between the current state of technological development and its direct application to the contemporary city gives scope for positioning a whole new scheme of appropriation of space, in order to transform it through free data, our data, which will reshape the static geometries that we now see from the windows of planes. And of the planes themselves.
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IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
Manuel Gausa, IaaC Dean
EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
EDITORIAL TEAM Manuel Gausa, IaaC Dean Mathilde Marengo, Communication & Publication Jordi Vivaldi, IaaC bits Editorial Coordinator
ADVISORY BOARD: Areti Markopoulou, IaaC Academic Director Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Bcn Director Silvia Brandi, Academic Coordinator Ricardo Devesa, Advanced Theory Concepts Maite Bravo, Advanced Theory Concepts
DESIGN: Ramon Prat, ACTAR Editions
IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands
Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona
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