THE NEST | Advanced Digital Tools

THERMAL QUESTIONS: Q1. Having studied the sun path diagram, it is observed that there are low sun angles in the east and the west throughout the year. How can thermal heat gain be prevented from the east and the west direction? – To prevent the heat gain from the lower angle of the sun from … Read more

Trinitat Mosalas

The proposed student housing is a result of a system, designed with bottom to top approach, where a module design is considered with variable parameters to proliferate into a building proposal which establishes the relationship between structural and spatial organizations. The site falls within the close proximity of some institutions and more importantly close to … Read more

PATI de la VILA: 3d Printed Earthen Housing

Nader Akoum IAAC 3d Printing Earthen Architecture Housing

At a time when additive manufacturing using earth becomes commercial and available for large scale services, earthen housing becomes more possible without the heavy maintenance required for challenges like spanning, drying, heightening, printing, and durability. A student earthen housing project in Barcelona could vary in many capacities depending on its context of deployment, and in … Read more

A Policy for Digital Carbon Footprint, Barcelona

Every single search query, every streamed song or video and every email sent, billions of times over all around the world – it all adds up to an ever-increasing global demand for electricity, and to rising CO2 emissions too. Our increasing reliance on digital tools has an environmental impact that’s becoming increasingly harder to ignore. … Read more

Agua Mobility

Employing a passive design strategy for construction can be a viable way to address this issue since buildings use the majority of the energy consumed in a city for heating and cooling space. The goal of the study is to create a passive heating and cooling system in a controlled environment by experimenting with the … Read more

Localized food systems

The task required to pick up an urban challenge and develop a City Science Problem Framing Proposal in a few days workshop. The topic of localized food systems was chosen PROBLEM FRAMING “In order to feed a population expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050, the world will have to double its current … Read more

Towards Urban Democratic Adaptation

Adaptation districts towards prioritized urban interventions  in cities with limited green spaces.  The case study of the metropolitan area of Athens, Greece Athens, during the four last decades, has been extremely urbanized while changing the environment dramatically. By reclassifying open spaces and networks of urban mobility, this model aims to suggest strategies for prioritized urban … Read more

Decarbonization of Housing Stock in EU

Buildings are an intrinsic part of our lives, where we spend most of our time and unfold as human beings. However, through its different forms, the built environment is responsible for the majority of our energy consumption (around 40 %) and a primary source of greenhouse emissions GHG (around 36 %) (Anderson et al., 2015).  … Read more

Fibra Terra

Posidonia Oceanica In the Mediterranean, most plant debris is made up of the species Posidonia Oceanica (L.) Delile, asuperior plant that is endemic to this sea. It forms extensive meadows from the shallowest areas of the coast to variable depths, depending on how deep light can penetrate the water to enable photosynthesis to take place. … Read more

AIReclaim

AIR COMFORT The air comfort depends on the gases and particulate matters in the air. The gases consist of nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and ozone. As well as the gases there are particulate matters in air which are categorised depending on their diameter. The main categories are the PM2.5 and PM10. In 2021 WHO … Read more

1:1 Arched Vault Competition Proposal

Nader Akoum 3d Printing Architecture Clay

The competition proposal of a 1:1 3d printed arched clay vault should be characterized by feasibility in construction. To achieve feasibility, the design of the vault uses bended sheets of wood to carry arches, dwells on strong connections in the infills, and complies by site printing restrictions [4,500 meters of print length alongside a maximum … Read more

Earth 3D Printed Pavilion: Optimized Arches for Self-support and The Fifth Facade

Designing for the 3D printing of a self-supporting Pavilion Background For the Competition phase, the brief asked for a design of geometries that addressed the 5th facade in the attempt to cover or go over and above the average human height. Our proposal attempts to have this brief satisfied without the use of additional/external support … Read more

Sustainable Forest Management

Our Sustainable Forest Management course kicked off in December with an open air lecture from Dr. Arbol. This explorative walk through the Valldaura forest helped us to better observe and understand how the ecosystem forest functions. We also learned how to identify the existing tree species and their way of growing in the context of … Read more

MO5 Collaborative Design – Bio Berms

After analyzing the site of Font del Gos we quickly realized that soil erosion was a significant problem.The site is a case study of human interception of an ecosystem, a naturally evolvedlandscape and water stream disturbed by human doings, causing dysfunction.Dry, eroded soil is unable to absorb water properly when raining.This causes a lack of … Read more