The Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities (MAEBB) postgraduate program is an 11-month immersive academic program focused on learning how to design and build a new generation of buildings and cities to respond to the planet’s emerging climate challenges. The program is carried out in Valldaura Labs, in Barcelona, a 135 He property located in the Collserola forest. Here, students will live and work surrounded by nature while using the most advanced technologies and design techniques in the pursuit of what is also IAAC’s long term initiative, to create self-sufficient and ecological environments.
The seminar explores materiality as an active and generative structure within architecture, not as passive matter but as a morphological intelligence that informs space, performance and construction. Building on the urgencies of ecological transition and the rise of advanced digital fabrication, Morpho Materialities Lab positions material research as a design driver, where material and form co-evolve through responsive and iterative processes.
Students will engage in hands-on material prototyping as a primary research method, working through tactile, analog and manual experimentation before progressively translating those insights into computational and digital fabrication strategies. Matter is not predefined or represented; Matter emerges through experimentation and iterative shaping, becoming a constructive tool that informs both form and space.
The seminar operates beyond “material follows form”, focusing on how their tactility, texture, behavior, and transformation can generate new spatial languages and modes of inhabitation. Inspired by Enric Miralles’ conception of materiality as a thinking structure, the lab frames architecture as a performative field where material decisions become formal and environmental decisions.
Aligned with industrially oriented research, the agenda emphasizes real-world scalability, fabrication readiness, and integration within contemporary construction and circular economy frameworks. Students will prototype large-scale advanced material systems, informed by computational design tools, digital fabrication, and environmental feedback loops, aiming not only to imagine alternative material futures but to create new materialities as viable architectural prototypes.
The seminar’s theoretical framework is complemented by a Material Lexicon, a curated vocabulary exploring conceptual, technical, and philosophical dimensions of materiality. These terms such as porous, multifunctional, changeable, and sympoietic articulate how matter behaves, transforms, and co-evolves with architecture, providing a linguistic and conceptual foundation for experimentation.
Material-Form Co-Evolution: Understand and apply the concept of materiality as a generative system where material properties directly inform spatial and formal decisions.
Hands-on Material Research: Develop skills in analog, tactile, and experimental material prototyping as a primary mode of architectural investigation.
Digital Translation: Translate physical experiments into computational and digital fabrication workflows, bridging manual exploration with advanced digital processes.
Responsive and Iterative Design: Apply iterative design methodologies to develop materials and forms that adapt, respond, or transform according to environmental, structural, or performative conditions.
Sustainability & Circularity: Integrate sustainable, recycled, and bio-based materials into design strategies, aligning with circular economy principles and ecological responsibility.
Industrial & Large-Scale Application: Design and implement material experiments with awareness of scalability, constructability, and applicability to real-world architectural contexts.
Ultimately, the seminar invites students to rethink the boundaries between matter, machine, and imagination transforming materials into agents of architectural thought and ecological intelligence.
1st term Research on state-of-the-art technologies and materials Introduction to Materials and Geometry Systems Implementation and drawings of Craft-based iterations Development of Fabrication Methods Preliminary Materiality and Architecture Proposal
2nd term Fabrication prototypes Analysis and results of fabrication prototypes Development of Materiality, Geometry and Design and their application in Architecture applications Presentation of a segment of the proposed Materiality Design
3th term Materiality and Architecture proposal Fabrication of a bigger prototype as a component of a proposed building design Short film to document the full design and fabrication development, including final drawings and prototypes.
view Syllabus & Faculty
Abstract and purposeThe collapse of the European wool value chain—processing shifted east, traditional breeds producing coarse, low‑value fibre, and raw fleece often classed as waste—coincides with a crisis in ceiling construction: high embodied carbon, linear material flows, and aesthetic loss. This thesis proposes CatVa: a prefabricated compressed earth–grog block reinforced with directionally aligned waste wool … Read more
