When we think on the question of ecology and how it affects the structure of buildings, we like to be inspired by the pioneers of discipline. Humboldt, Haeckel, Lovelock, and others envisioned the Earth as a huge living organism where organic and inorganic matter were all connected. It is this all-inclusive approach to nature as a network of relationships that we want to build upon.
Thus, we assume that structures are not a separate problem of the building. Structures are not only governed by the laws of physics, either, but they are intimately related with living creatures as to form a whole organism. If in the early 20th Century modernists had to redefine the formal vocabulary and syntax of architecture, then we believe the task of our time is to redesign the roles and relationships of the built environment.

Therefore, structure for us is not only a matter of solving the load-bearing requirements of the building with the minimum amount of matter. It is not only an issue of addressing global agendas by choosing the proper materials (carbon footprint, material life cycles, etc.). Structures belong to a complex ecosystem that should be addressed from a holistic and relational point of view. This idea compels us to design and explore structural systems with the resilience and topological ductility necessary to meet requirements of all kinds, beginning with issues of space, form, and matter, questions of manufacturing, transportation and assembly and concerns even beyond that. Thus, structures will no longer be something we hide or we minimize and then hand over to engineers. In this workshop, we would like to gain new leverage over the issue by assuming that we will make only a few steps of the immense journey ahead of our discipline.

We are not looking for neutral and rigid cartesian structures made of preconceived patterns and repetitive orders. We do not want restrainers to architectural freedom, but enablers and guides to it.  Structures are stable but should not be rigid in our mind. They are ductile and can be topologically transformed, but we need to have an intimate connection with them, as the blacksmith connects with iron while working with it. Thus, we are interested in hybrid, opportunistic and informal structures capable of meeting irregularities, local episodes, and accidents and generate something out of them, because structures can be comprehensible and explicit, as well as surprising and mysterious.

The process is conceived as a dialectic exploration in small groups, with a first phase in which we will generate structural variations of the volumes inherited from previous workshops, analyzing and manipulating them, defining structural matrixes that occupy, define and segment space, and addressing the character and consistency of the resulting structures (including programmatic and contextual implications). Subsequently, prototypes will be selected and developed, incorporating questions of program, form, and space at different levels, as well as material and industrial logic. The trial phase of the workshop will be the last one and we will explore and exhaust in it the performance of the prototypes responding to new requirements, producing singularities and “socializing” with other elements of the built environment (additional topological transformations, structural textures, construction details, etc.), anticipating inputs from future workshops.

The workshop will focus on timber structures. Considering the general scope of the curriculum of the MAEBB and the context of Valldaura forest as a resource, we will concentrate in the possibilities of wood (and its related technologies) as a structural material and as definitely one of the best options in construction from an ecological point of view. This should not be considered as a restrictive frame, since justified hybrid solutions are possible as well, but as a challenge. Wood has successfully performed the role traditionally assigned to other materials in the past (from tension chords to pipes) and offers a sustainable future of intensive use and promising technologies.