IE School of Architecture & Design Newsletter - April 2022

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time to focus on

(UN)BUILT ENVIRONMENTS

Liquid learning, asynchronous, live-online, face-to-face, synchronous on-site: We find ourselves now thoroughly accustomed with a terminology which in March of 2020 seemed alien. Yet as we enter the first weeks of a mask-free campus, it is clear that this new vocabulary won't be disappearing from our memory banks any time soon.      

The pandemic didn’t create an anomalous fleeting bubble. It seems to have accelerated a collision of worlds, the physical and the digital, which we were already heading toward rapidly.  

This accelerated entanglement has brought to the forefront radical pedagogical and disciplinary discussions within universities and professions. For our own school, these conversations are of course not new. The pursuit of alternative and avant-garde approaches to education and practice is embedded into the genetic wiring of our broader institutional fabric. 

What the pandemic has underscored for us however, is that there are vast and strange new frontiers opening before us. Not just digital, not just physical, but rather some sort of an amalgam. 

These frontiers offer new ways to practice, new ways to collaborate, new ways to achieve precision, new routes for empowerment, new avenues for publication, visualization, and discussion, new potentials for decentralization, and new fields of opportunity. 

Most importantly, these frontiers are by and large in a remarkable state of malleability. They are vast and raw (un)built environments, with trajectories still in a state of significant flux. As disciplines fundamentally anchored in the shaping of the built environment, it is possible that we have a noteworthy opportunity to get in on the ground floor in shaping the courses of these strange new worlds. To do so requires us to continue embracing this newfound entanglement, and to ask radical and oftentimes uncomfortable questions concerning the fundamentals of education and the professions we are engaged in. 

Cem Kayatekin

Assistant Professor at IE School of Architecture and Design

The Floating University of Berlin

How Video-Gaming is impacting architecture... in a positive way

“The use of these tools allows architects to focus on the core of their work, reducing technological obstacles and allowing them to produce more and better in less time, as well as to transmit ideas more efficiently”, explains Ángel Flores, who teaches the Alternative Practices course within the Bachelor in Architectural Studies. 

We spoke with Professor Flores to learn more about the use of Unreal Engine, and how he is putting this technology into practice with his students as part of an exercise to design an exhibition at the Mies Van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion.

Merging craft and virtual reality in design:

A new scope of skills

In the elective Digital Handcraft course, Gianluca Pugliese explores students' 3D modelling skills in the new virtual reality space. “We work with VR technology to generate a new design modelling algorithm that will create an artisanal object using 3D printing and VR technologies,” explains Professor Pugliese.  It's a way of bringing tradition to the class while using the new tools designers have at their disposal today. “I'm sure that in the near future, craft will be digital,” he adds.  

Architecture student María Antonia Franco completing her internship in the studio Miralles Tagliabue EMBT in Barcelona

The academic value of internships

It is critically important for architecture students who hope to go into professional practice to gain firsthand experience. Internships are one way to do this. Some programs require internships after graduation and other suggest gap years. At IE we believe that providing internship opportunities within our curriculum is the best way for students to understand the relationship between the academic and professional realms. 

Our program, established 10 years ago, allows our students to experience diverse professional settings. This not only helps prepare them for their future careers but it also allows them to experience different types of roles and host organizations. During the internship they develop not only their architectural abilities, but some of the many soft skills needed professionally. They learn to analyze the professional context through observation, asking questions, and employing a critical mindset. Currently, we can count more than 125 placements throughout the world to help prepare our students for their futures. 

Associate Dean of Design Edgar González at the Metaverse Summit Madrid

IE A&D Metaverse Summit Madrid on the Spanish state television

During the pandemic, the virtual world helped us stay connected, but it has also contributed to a false sense of connectedness. The metaverse, an immersive and yet incipient environment, offers opportunities for architects and designers to push the boundaries of the physical world and, at the same time, explore different types of interaction, which take advantage of their knowledge and creativity, as we identified during the Metaverse Madrid Summit hosted by IE A&D.

Learn more in this video story published on the Spanish state television.

Master in Real Estate Development during a field trip

Meet the landmark project-based learning in the Master in Real Estate Development

The Master in Real Estate Development Capstone Project is a real opportunity for students to solidify and execute everything they have learned during the program. Each group of students, which is led by a real estate practitioner with decades of experience, must provide a holistic solution to a real-life present-day urban challenge faced by Madrid. They must deliver a well-thought-out proposal for all urban, architectural, financial, sustainable, legal, and social aspects that must be addressed by a landmark real estate development.

In the 2022 edition, students will design a new tertiary area in the Barajas Airport for AENA and create a new asset retrofitting strategy for the MADBit area, among others.

Finally, the students will present their project to a jury composed of key figures in the Spanish real estate industry who will provide perspective and feedback directly from the front line. 

IE A&D at Disrupt, the largest business of architecture symposium in the world

May 1-5

Online

Disrupt will bring together global business experts that have contributed to build and lead companies such as UNStudio, BIG, Snohetta, Perkins&Will, Zaha Hadid Architects, with the ultimate goal of pushing the boundaries of architecture as a profession. They will discuss as well the different factors that have influenced successful companies, and those that will keep doing so in the future, including strategy, the use of technology, talent acquisition, building innovative and avantgarde company cultures, understanding and developing new business models to support the architectural profession, and much more. In this context,

Jerónimo van Schendel, Director of the Master in Business for Architecture and Design, will give a lecture about why business, entrepreneurship and innovation education are essential for architects to carry out a renewed and expanded role in the years to come. 

NextGen on the Spot:

The Venture City

May 11, 6pm CEST

Online

This month, as part of the NextGen lecture series, we welcome Brooke Richardson, Investment Director of First Ticket EMEA at TheVentureCity, a global female-founded venture capital firm focused on making a difference for minority communities. 

Richardson, trained in marketing and an expert in sales, is eager to work with people looking to create their own start-ups, and will share insights from the investment world for early stage, what VCs to look for, common pitfalls, and much more! 

The Next Space. The Adaptive Home

May 11-12

IE Tower

How can we make our existing homes fit for their new purposes? And how can we rethink the way we've been building residential growing needs and changing circumstances? These are the questions at the heart of The Next Space: The Adaptive Home, a think tank designed by FRAME Magazine that is aimed at creating a framework for the future of spatial design. 

This new edition will focus on strategies to make homes more adaptive to changing needs and conditions and will be co-hosted by IE School of Architecture and Design. 

Can you bring value to the conversation? Get your ticket here!

If you are not in Madrid, sign up to join online here.

UIA's International Forum:

Affordable Housing Activation

May 18-19

Gran Teatro Príncipe Pio (Madrid) & Online

Access to decent and adequate housing is a universal right, but it has become a problem on a global scale. The search for solutions is a collective responsibility. For this reason, the International Union of Architects (UIA) and the Spanish Council of Architects have joined efforts to launch the International Forum Affordable Housing Activation.

IE School of Architecture and Design will be participating as academic partner and renowned professors and friends of the school, such as Ben van Berkel, Stefano Boeri, Beatriz Corredor and Hélène Chartier will lecture at the event.

If you cannot travel, you can access online dynamic atlases that, for the first time, allow you to know, in real time the main barriers that hinder or prevent the right to decent and affordable housing throughout the planet as well as artificial intelligence tools that interconnect those barriers with thousands of cases of good practices.

Mission Impossible:

Becoming more profitable by being more sustainable

May 25, 7.00pm CEST

Aula Magna Valentín Díez Morodo & Online

Being sustainable and yet achieving a high return of investment seems like a mission impossible to some, but not for Vasakronan, Sweden's largest property company. 

By integrating sustainability in all of the company's operating activities and engaging each and every employer, Vasakronan makes sure that it generates a high, risk-weighted return to its owners (first, second, third, and fourth Swedish National Pension Funds), while making a profit for Sweden's current and future pensioners, though never at the expense of the environment and people. 

During this lecture, Anna Denell, Head of Sustainability at Vasakronan, will share how the company became more profitable by being more sustainable.

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