2016 Brief
SUMMER WORKSHOP
Trans-computational membranes 4.0 will continue exploring computational design methods through the use of digital-analogue experimentation. With the focus on flexible materials, we have developed large scale pavilions and installations during the last three years of research, seamlessly integrating physical simulations into the design process. This has facilitated the development of Open Source generative digital design tools, enabling the digital manipulation of flexible materials.
This year’s workshop will continue further with this research, deploying advanced fabrication into digital design tools. Workshop participants will not only explore new design methods, but also adopt novel manufacturing techniques, focusing on robotic fabrication of flexible structures. AAVSMadrid 2016 will therefore expand its domain from the digital to the physical in a seamless workflow, where design and fabrication not only coexist, but also interweave at every step.
About AAVS
The AA Visiting School (AAVS) launched in Dubai in early 2008, and has since grown into a worldwide programme of more than 50 annual courses, held on five continents in dozens of cities, territories and remote regions. These courses provide teaching and learning opportunities for students and other international participants to engage with – up close, and led by AA tutors and other experts – many of the world’s most pressing architectural, technological, cultural, urban and social issues.
The short-course offerings in the Visiting School are open to visiting students enrolled at schools throughout the world, currently-enrolled AA students, recent graduates, architects and other creative individuals who wish to further their knowledge, practice and skills in architecture. Over the past six years thousands of participants have travelled to the main AA School here in Bedford Square; to Hooke Park, the AA’s rural campus in Dorset in the West Country of England; or to one of the dozens of unique, one-off destinations that have served as the setting for AA Visiting School courses.
All courses within the Visiting School are modelled on the AA’s famed unit system of teaching and learning architecture – through the pursuit of agendadriven project briefs shaped by students working intensively in small groups in studio tutorials with AA tutors. In the Visiting School, the agendas of each course offering relate closely to the geographic and cultural conditions of each course setting.
