Atmospheric Conditions 1Javier Peña

bits

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Implementing Advanced Knowledge

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The back and forth journeys between Murcia and Bilbao for so long time demonstrated the clear different weather between both cities, as well as the other climates along the way. However, a car is a bubble which can keep constant conditions inside, such as 21ºC of temperature, independently of the outside conditions during these long ways. Our trip through the generic city is homogeneous on form and codes, as well as about our comfort.

On the other hand, each time I got Bilbao the atmosphere happened as the same, continuously changing and unexpected.This is what meteorologists call ‘variable weather’… which has a sun, a cloud and drizzling at the same point.

Traditionally, Architecture has been considered as a defensive barrier between people and climate, and it has been configured as an specific subject for each geography, in order to be ideally useful upon this defense: to give shelter or to protect… these are verbs that describe this defensive action.

Inside it happens the same: historically the consideration of ‘static building’ of that which has been constructed hampers its mobility, except in respectable exceptions (doors or windows)…The Vitruvian concept of ‘firmitas’, has been established over the collective subconscious, as a straitjacket that makes us difficulties to provide a dynamic and interactive quality to our Architecture regarding to users.

However, we could make a negotiated Architecture, by understanding building envelopes as intelligent skins, which are able to modify themselves from user’s needs and climatic reactions, and organizing spaces that give a dialogue according to weather, sensations and inner comfort.

Design with nature This Atmospheric Design quality comes up from an open comprehension of technology when we have a glance at back and forward during a research of suitable architecture and coherent designs onto the project context, where the edge between ‘Low and High tech’ appears deeply blurred.

This is the work that we try to explore at DWN: understanding the design of components (architecture, social economies, objects and materials) of productive landscapes and their links with metabolic cycles, biomimesis and technology.

These interactions aim began to be developed some years ago, however the MAA line it is currently when it is starting to be visible.

But certainly Atmospheric Design is quite elusive: at IAAC we have been

Atmospheric Conditions 1

Figure 1 - We5 is a project of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Advanced Architecture 2013/14 Wind Energy Machines Introductory - Alejandro Martinez del Campo, Alessio Salvatore Verdolino, Hriday Siddarth Saini, Ricardo Perez

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stimulating its emergence (even using shamanic project rites); up to now, it is only coming up on a partial way, as a sign that something much bigger is happening next, for instance:

1)Targets in a blurry worldWe will try to link different types of knowledge and sensibilities about the

Atmospheric Design beyond the energy process, walking on the edge between Art, Science, Technology and Social Behaviors (ASTS).

Trying to achieve depth in DWN parameters, we have pushed the students to be radicals, erasing some of the standard design conditions in order to focus on the controversy aspect as ASTS seems like four different ways leading to different places. Due to a deal with these apparent contradictions, we refuse recipes and standard protocols as a teaching practice, guiding to new opportunities which link contemporary ideas and technologies, such as metabolism, naturalization and biomimesis, expanding innovation into the vacuum between disciplines and professional profiles, which try to fill the knowledge interlaced space generated by Global Warming, Internet and Emergent Economies worldwide.

We pursue that each student has at the end of this master an open view to explore the changeable world of the sustainability, morphed by the heterogeneous geopolitics and economic country conditions where our student must work in their professional future lives.

2) Valldaura_SmartGreenThe Design with Nature research centers its studies in the sustainable

habitat, approaching four central aspects: food production, energy production, object production and social interaction, (using the Valldaura Labs campus -Food Lab, Energy Lab and Green Fab Lab) in order to research the production of elements key that are involved in self-sufficiency: food, energy and things, with the use of advanced technology. There’s no way an organism can use more energy than it produces.

Within this course architects, landscape architects, urban designers, agriculturists, designers, biologists and other scientists will rethink how cities and buildings mesh with the natural world using technological innovation coupled with inspiration from the biological processes of nature.

3) Social EnergiesActivating Valldaura means adding energy, but not as it was just to plug

something in, but from the comprehension of phenomenology and daily business of a natural and productive link at the same time. This place has been transformed only by this continuous dialogue between human beings and nature for nine centuries, within its proper decisive and even decayed times.

For all this, several devices that generate energy for specific activities have been created: from the control of wind power or water abstraction and irrigation devices to the birds attraction to provide of a higher variety to the closer ecosystem…All of these are transferrable devices to cities, useful for valuing energy and its integration within Architecture and social space.

Construction of a MicrocosmosBetween the teaching world and professional practice we set links continuously, in an unconscious way I guess. On this way, Pormetxeta Square is on the other side of the mirror, connected in a conceptual and practical way at the same time, through naturalization of a highly polluted industrial environment.

To give shape to this inhabited infrastructure together with MTM, we proposed the development of each element of the proposal specifically, by working on different projects assembled to the urban space simultaneously, and prioritizing a phenomenological immersion over a lineal functional resolution.

Barakaldo’s changeable weather, the wet due to the sea inlet, a technical soil and the closer geography are the guidelines that build the new physical context for users, and the standards ruling out makes the local quality more intense and specific: 3D hexagonal floor tiled surfaces in negotiation with

Figure 2 - Self-sufficient Buildings Studio, 2012 IaaC.

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rush, basalt cobbles that create soft and continuous geometries by changing shape and bonding, metallic surfaces that bounce the sky and natural light during the day and turn in street lights at night, or a breakwater that levitates over the intermediate square, horizontality onto an extremely sloped space.

Edition or canibalism?We have taken photos of the work once and again, together with friends and in each visit, and tried to catch the moment of the work, but also that one of change when into a few seconds shadows become more dense or dark sky which gave showers above us some minutes later, or those hailstones that were swept along the basalt by the wind, or the white snow that stayed on the metallic deployé…

Figure 3 - AmpLeaf: Ecological Resonance is a project of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Advanced Architecture 2013/14 Wind Energy Introductory Studio by: Kateryna Rogynska, Ramin Shambayati, Robert Douglas McKaye, Sahil Sharma Figure 4 - 3D Printed Wind-Machine-Charger is a project of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Advanced Architecture 2013/14 Wind Energy Machines Introductory Studio by:  Aditya Kadabi, Elena Mitrofanova, Gustavo Adolfo Triana Martinez

When the end of a work comes up, we always have the same dilemma about photography; how to take them, how to catch that thing which provoked the project. This is a well-known conversation that becomes long and longer with our closer photographers Juan de la Cruz, Jesús or David in each work they perform; drawings, images, framings, lights; compulsory photos, environmental ones or details; in this case we thought on the possibility of make the process even longer through the incorporation of Ruben Tortosa during the edition of the work…Or should we call this cannibalism instead?

I figure that in each look, the works die and go into the mind of each of us; if we produce a new object/work in addition of our look this transformation becomes bigger. We have developed a project that later has been built by others and photographed by David Frutos; now, Ruben Tortosa transforms it within analogic and digital systems in a plastic work which catches the environment and atmosphere of Bilbao…the changeable weather that always surprise us.

This double issue, that let us the possibility of editing, will become an exhibition by the collaboration between Ruben Tortosa and David Frutos.

We hope you enjoy this ambiguous atmospheric party…Is this art?

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Institut for Advanced Architecture of CataloniaBarcelona

IAAC

IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, BostonJuan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, MadridNeil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, BostonHanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, LondonVicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of BarcelonaWilly Muller, Director of Barcelona RegionalAaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Mu seum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, LondonNikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Eco logia Urbana, BarcelonaArtur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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