Syllabus

Environmental Logics explores the design opportunities which are embedded in the climatic and resource crisis which faces the planet.

Architecture and cities play a principal role in this situation. This environmental crisis is a social crisis, as its origin and motives are in society, and by 2050 nearly 70% of the population will be urban.

Cities and buildings are no longer isolated objects, but nodes in networked material and social systems in continuous interaction among themselves. These interactions take place with the atmosphere, with living and non-living material systems and with society, establishing a set of relationships that need to be addressed from specific architectural and urban variables. According to the nature of exchanges and the spatial and temporal scales involved, these interactions can be divided in three logics —climatic logics, metabolic logics and post-occupancy logics— which address respectively the interactions with the atmosphere, with the geo-biosphere and with its users.

METABOLIC LOGIC
Cities are no longer considered isolated entities but understood as material constructs which are interconnected to the environment through flows of matter, energy and information. Interior architecture, as a material practice, establishes an ecological web of connections between buildings and the bio-geosphere. Unlike modern industrial systems where non-renewable materials follow linear flows from mine to dump, this seminar explores the design potential of considering building components as part of the planet’s material systems. Unlike modern industrial closed systems, this novel cradle-to-cradle understanding considers building materials to be in a perpetual flow, and therefore the design of material logistics and assemblage logics becomes a crucial architectural driver.

CLIMATIC LOGIC
Global warming has situated the atmosphere as a central design driver. Buildings and urban environments can, through its spatial and material lineaments, provide specific microclimates. Challenging the modern insulated-envelope paradigm, buildings interact with local climatic conditions articulating an open-system thermodynamic approach to architecture. Interestingly this field of enquiry needs to understand the connection between climate, architecture, social behaviour and the human body, introducing health and comfort, well-being and pleasure — physiology, psychology and neuroscience— as questions on which designers need to take stock.

POST-OCCUPANCY LOGIC
Human occupation rhythms dynamics differ substantially from meteorological, biological and geological timescales. Determined by generational and social timeframes and by economic cycles. the adaptability and obsolescence of buildings is a major challenge that needs to be addressed by designers. As a result, the flexibility and resilience, or the durability and maintenance of buildings, become key factors to evaluate how the embedded energy stocked in buildings is used and amortized by society fulfilling the maximum power principle.

Energy is the basis of all human activity. It has been, is and will be a motor of social, economic and cultural change. It has been that way since man learnt to use fire in a controlled form. Historically, energy has represented the most evident and palpable relationship between technology, economy and culture. Yet, nowadays most of the big figures and statistics on energy do not inspire optimism. The emissions released from the combustion of fossil fuels are dangerously raising the global atmospheric CO2 concentration and causing smog formation in metropolitan agglomerations to the degree that the planet is warming and cities are drowning. Climate emergency is being declared by states and supra-state political structures as a SOS signal from a civilization in deep environmental decay.

A new Energy Transition is on the political agendas of many, but grounding of the civilization survival needs and apparent political will is slow and weak. The worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and over 80% of energy moving the world is from fossil origin. A paradigm shift of global energetics is urgently needed. At the same time the contemporary city is witnessing a significant change in energy demand patterns as new forms of consumption expand quickly. In the era of global warming and perturbed climate in densely built areas, together with new comfort expectations, the global demand for space cooling is growing at a particularly rapid rate, and projected to grow even more in the coming decades. The demand growth and emissions reduction need represent an authentic energy aporia which fully impacts architectural design.

On the other side, for the first time in the history of the architectural profession the climate is not any more a fix condition. For the first time an architect should face the fact that the building to be designed is going to last more than the climate conditions at the moment the building has been designed.

The Seminar focuses on a dynamically interacts of built object with both its natural and its technological environments, turning it in a active node of energy networks. The scope of the Seminar ranges from physical concepts, big picture facts, to design examples.

The Landscape of Energy Seminar is a part of Environmental Logics Unit, that explores the design challenges and opportunities embedded in the climatic and resource crisis which faces the planet.
The objective of the Seminar is to deepen in the contemporary questions and paradigm changes, as well as to explore the ways forward. It is going to evolve in parallel to the Environmental Logics Workshop, tackling also the main topics of the Workshop: metabolic, climatic and post-occupancy logics.

One day a long time ago, with the help of a rope, a group of young artists went down a hole in the ground. Forewarned by those who had first found the hole, they took their torches and brought to light one of the wonders of the classical world: motifs from Homer’s journeys, bodies, birds, nymphs and fruits all glimmering, reflected off the glass embedded in the stucco. Vaults held up by columns as thick as a tendon, architraves supported on birds and jets of water. The walls seemed to be alive.

The artists returned to the top, their ropes having led to other ways of seeing. Michaelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci could have been among these youth. And if it hadn’t been that day, it could have been any other. Just a moment underground would suffice to etch a signature in the stucco wall. What they painted after their journey through time changed the course of painting and became known as Grottoesque art. And what they found was the Domus Aurea, the villa that Nero had built for himself in Rome after the fire in the year 64.

While the present seeks futurity, we constantly change our past. In this course we will intervene in the material world by changing its hierarchies. Beyond the certainty of architectural historiography or regulations of dwelling standards, we attempt to be exposed to other habitation experiences and uncertainties. We propose a journey over time in order to join—using our ropes—two complex and heterogeneous material events. They both have in common the allowance of a simultaneous and vivid accommodation (in the sense of habitation appropriation) of a large cohort of people within a sort of material structure that could be qualified as gigantic: on the one hand, The Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a historical residence of the King of Spain near Madrid and, on the other, an extremely dense yet ordinary city block in the industrial district of Poblenou in Barcelona, located between the streets of Àvila, Àlava, Pujades and Pere IV.

As a general rule, the programme of collective dwelling is solved within a structural support which has been meticulously adjusted to rigid and determinate expectations of usage. The air mediating between inhabitants, spatial envelope and minimum living tools is very reduced and, occasionally, it does not permit the possibility of other means or other ways of living. In this workshop, as opposed to such hopeless determinism, we will explore apparently over-sized and seemingly useless spatial supports, which in order to operate they will require the incorporation of unexpected mediator architectures.

Hence, the field of study will be the interaction between support and life. Due to scalar imperative, such relationship will require an active, creative, inquisitive and critical practice of dwelling through the agency of spatial appropriation; a sort of self-poetic form of habitation.

It is impossible to conceive a building apart from the human activities it serves. We assume that there is a reciprocal relationship between human-made environments and social behavior. From that point we can elaborate that:
1) Individuals and society can and have an impact on their own built environments.
2) Built environments have the potential to influence individuals and their relations.

These statements raise new questions to be considered. We have to redefine the conventional role of the architect in this equation. It is also important to assess the real impact of architecture on social relations, among the good intentions announced by (good-hearted or fraudster) architects and developers.

We defend that users should be involved in the architectural process that shapes the spaces that they will inhabit. Different strategies are needed to engage people in the each stage. Yet, we cannot think of "people" as a cohesive group with a single mindset. The same space can be seen in opposite ways by groups that have contradictory interests.

We will look closer to certain typologies of spaces that have a deep relation with social relations, like collective housing and public space. Thence, we will connect will broader theories: from the Right to Housing to the Right to the City.

In this short seminar students will be introduced to these questions and some tools to be used in their projects, as well as cases of architectural projects where the topics are very present.

Right after the last crisis of contemporary architecture (2008), the general reactions coming from within the discipline, worn out after twenty years of neoliberal optimism about the vitality and the paradigmatic shift associated to the processes of globalization, consisted in an abrupt and frantic self-retraction. The objective was then set, among other tactical places, into redefining the discipline’s foundational principles by means of holding onto fictional certainties that could stand alone in an extremely volatile world, itself confronted to a whole new series of political thresholds that ended up turning the processes of globalization upside down. Amid the multiplicity of reactionary and/or sceptical positions taken during the 2010 decade that opportunistically found a fertile ground for the revival of one way or another of nostalgia, Rem Koolhaas used it as a medium to renew his paranoid critical method in real time, through a retrograde mode. Against the grain of the positivism embedded in most contemporary avant-gardes, and with similarly provocative attitude as his challenges to modernism, he articulated a program that was understood, rather than as a provocation, as an essentialist return to the original sources of architecture. In this context of expectation, the curatorial proposal put forward for the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2014, Elements of Architecture, was structured along a formal and exhaustive discourse about the architectural elements: ceiling, window, corridor, floor, balcony, fireplace, façade, roof, door, wall, stair, ramp, toilet, escalator, elevator.
Not by chance, both in their statements and in their production, the contemporary avant-garde, occupying the mainstream before this pendular move, had tackled the critique to established definitions of the alleged essences of the discipline by consistently developing forms of architecture grounded in the systematization of difference, rather than in the mystification and repetition of the same. These practices were driven to deterritorialize the aforementioned definitions to reformulate architecture’s conditions from within, through the management, sometimes decorative, sometimes transformative, of complex processes of continuous variation. Some of these trends found, centrally or tangentially to their program, a thread to follow in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, regarding his production as an open, radically austere model, constantly mobilized against the elemental. Evidently, Gaudí’s architecture, even in its most stereotypical formalistic interpretations, does not sit on foreshadowed grounds, unless this is to alter them from within. This alteration is meant to make architecture’s principles continuously evolve, directing them towards radical forms yet to come. His work can be thus understood as an open-ended manifold of processes that, departing from sedimented and conventional elements in the history of architecture, leads them through a practice of continuous variation (apparently crafty), with the management of allegory, the use of vague formal references, the productive celebration, and the mystic signification, in view to differentiate them.
The Anti-Element develops post-elemental processes of material becoming (eventually neo-elemental), retaking Antoni Gaudí’s work both as a raw material and as a model to flip current reactionary, stagnant approaches based on an idea of the disciplinary as sedimented, established, conventionalized, naturalized body. It does so by looking at the way in which architectural elements, in Gaudí’s work, are dismantled, disaggregated, diluted, dissolved, fused, distorted, disfigured, and transfigured into new ones. The traits engaged by this process of disfiguration and transfiguration are approached with a high level of technical precision and conceptual abstraction, not regarding them as ends, but rather as the ultimate means in a process driven by transformation, rather than preservation. Technical rigor (articulated by computational tools and methods) is seen as the prerequisite for the constitution of the vague essences of the non-elemental condition of the anti-element. Linked to major and minor systems, processes of differentiation direct the power of the anti-element for the development of complex integrative forms of architecture. The research framework departs from Koolhaas’ matrix of elements and directs it to unfold capabilities, instead of folding certainties. At every edition, the anti-elements omnipresent in Gaudí’s work (ceilings, windows, corridors, balconies, fireplaces, façades, roofs, doors, walls, stairs) are rebuilt as systems of variable control that, singularized, become idealized monstrosities (models), extreme anticipations of architectures to be.

In a world where technology has augmented our living capacities, where codes surround us and influence our actions, we sometimes ask ourselves to what extent architecture could - or will - emerge from the use of algorithms. Our discipline, with all its layers of complexity, is still intertwined with the action of drawing, and to a certain extent, with the hand. Is this a contradiction?

In this course, we will momentarily abandon the traditional drawing methodologies bound to the tyranny of the hand and dive into the world of computation in order to play with data and digital protocols to see whether we can stimulate the emergence of architecture through drawing from which we remain the authors, but haven’t drawn a single line ourselves. Architectural solution that we could never have produced without the help of the super calculating powers of our computers!

The course will focus on the multiscalar design of the surface of a Barcelona block, per student. Each of you will develop a scenario, defining the users, the circulatory requirements, the density, the levels of privacy, and set up a design strategy which you will convert into a series of instructions and use computation in order to produce iterations of floor plans. The course, unfolded as a sort of game will see you negotiate with yourself, with your users, with your code, with your program, and eventually with your colleagues, in order to stimulate the generation of drawings of architectural distribution, that, when combined together with the ones of your classmates, will form an urban landscape, as a fictional segment of the city we live in.

Tectonics is a word with broad and some:mes misleading uses in architectonic language. In this workshop we draw from Semper’s seminal ideas on what tectonics is, and exemplify it in the most tectonic material of all: wood. Students will work as a group in order to understand the poten:al and constraints that wood offers as the main building material for the XXIst century, but also where it comes from, and the vast tradi:ons and cra[ passed from genera:on to genera:on. Simultaneously, they will explore hands-on provisional solu:ons for wood building systems in our Mediterranean environment, by focusing on its challenges in this par:cular clima:c and cultural context, amidst the current global climate and resources destruc:on frenzy, in order to contribute as architects to provide an urgent alterna:ve to this war on nature scenario.

The process of designing, building, inhabiting is understood as a process of helical evolution where each phase crosses, overlaps, overlaps with the previous one. We design, we build, we inhabit and not necessarily in that order. It is a permanent transit between tradition and contradiction.

Architecture is a cultural fact and medium. It is also through architecture from where you can read the social, political and environmental aspects in general, in a broad and wide sense. This reality and capacity give shape, character, meaning and humanity to the space we inhabit.

The mass-media and the modern architecture were born together at the beginning of the XX Century. Both, modern and contemporary architecture and its massive diffusion cannot be detached each other. Now, the architecture has been globalized and has entered of full at the networks of the communication and, even, becoming part of marketing strategies.

Culture is a constructive material that from architecture and beyond architecture must be considered and treated.

Architecture is a cultural fact and medium. It is also through architecture from where you can read the social, political and environmental aspects in general, in a broad and wide sense. This reality and capacity give shape, character, meaning and humanity to the space we inhabit.

The mass-media and the modern architecture were born together at the beginning of the XX Century. Both, modern and contemporary architecture and its massive diffusion cannot be detached each other. Now, the architecture has been globalized and has entered of full at the networks of the communication and, even, becoming part of marketing strategies.

Culture is a constructive material that from architecture and beyond architecture must be considered and treated.

Architectural design is a field with a rich past and with an exciting future. While solidly rooted in a strong disciplinary framework, architectural design Is continuously evolving to meet new societal requirements. The last decades have seen major and rapid changes in the ways we understand, relate with and transform our physical environment. New global challenges, such as climate emergency, social inequality, global culture and pandemics, affect architecture's objectives, methods, processes and results. MIAD embraces these changing conditions and explores the potentials arising from them with a critical yet affirmative position and an engaged attitude towards our shared environment.

The Transversal Workshop is the final subject of the Master's programme, and it serves as an exploratory ground to test and contest the tools and visions learned throughout the five logics that make up the programme. Its main purpose Is to help students to find their personal voice as architects, integrating environmental, social, digital, tectonic and cultural logics within architectural design.

During the 2020-21 course, we will focus on Barcelona's Model Prison. This penitentiary structure operated from its construction in 1904 to its shutdown in 2015. Occupying two Eixample blocks in the city centre, La Model has an enormous city-making potential. However, what should the old prison become is a highly contested, and often heated, public debate. We propose MIAD's Transversal Workshop as an exploratory testing ground of desirable urban futures for this crucial urban situation in the centre of Barcelona.

The last two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in architecture, leading to what we call evolved logics of design. In this master program we will explore evolved design methodologies, operational approaches and theoretical frameworks through individual research.

Architectural research is not limited to an academic context; it also has a very significant presence in the professional sphere. The importance of research methodologies in both academic and professional fields has increased during these past decades, and post graduate courses are a perfect opportunity for learning how to transform a genuine interest into a formal research project.

The course sets out to explore conceptual approaches and methodological tools for successfully tackling research in the expanded architectural field, encompassing design, planning, landscape, building technology, representation, communication and theory.

The last two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in architecture, leading to what we call evolved logics of design. In this master program we will explore evolved design methodologies, operational approaches and theoretical frameworks through individual research.

Architectural research is not limited to an academic context; it also has a very significant presence in the professional sphere. The importance of research methodologies in both academic and professional fields has increased during these past decades, and post graduate courses are a perfect opportunity for learning how to transform a genuine interest into a formal research project.

The course sets out to explore conceptual approaches and methodological tools for successfully tackling research in the expanded architectural field, encompassing design, planning, landscape, building technology, representation, communication and theory.

To design (architecture) Is not only to create shapes. It Is not only to attend functions. It Is not only to bear loads. It Is not only to create comfort. It Is not only to compose rhythms. It Is not only to organize matter. To design (architecture) Is not, never, just a single thing.
We will look again at an old project and we will continue Its story. We will (re)understand Its particular architecture, In deep. And we will transform It -or not.

Maps, diagrams, scripts or scores are systems of mediation, abstract intermediaries that operatively inform the designers’ decision-making process by mediating between disparate levels of 'objective' reality and 'subjective' architectural aims.

The course will introduce and develop the concept and praxis of operative mapping, and it will explore the advanced design potential of some of this most relevant system of mediation through a theory-based seminar. The course will be organized as a four-week seminar combining lecture, student work review and open discussion formats.

The Final Master Thesis (FMT) should consist of a research study, design or implementation of a project in the field of logics of evolution for the contemporary contexts treated on the MIAD. This work is guided by a professor who provides tutoring and guidance throughout its development. Under her/his supervision, the student will write a document with the theoretical and practical research or content about their topic or subject. Research complementary seminars will help students to find their subjects/topics and introduce them to the research procedures and tools (PA004 and PA005).

The Final Master Thesis (FMT) should consist of a research study, design or implementation of a project in the field of logics of evolution for the contemporary contexts treated on the MIAD. This work is guided by a professor who provides tutoring and guidance throughout its development. Under her/his supervision, the student will write a document with the theoretical and practical research or content about their topic or subject. Research complementary seminars will help students to find their subjects/topics and introduce them to the research procedures and tools (PA004 and PA005).