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Students at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) designed and built this timber structure, inside a ruined 19th-century stable to house a KUKA six-axis industrial robot, acquired by the school for computer-controlled woodworking tasks. The exercise was the culmination of a master’s degree program, titled Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities, which brings 20 students from around the world to the school’s Valldaura campus, a 320-acre wooded estate in the hills north of Barcelona. (IAAC, a private foundation established in 2001, has a main campus with 300 international students in the city’s Poblenou district). Taking Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin apprenticeships as a model, explains school founder Vicente Guallart, students live and work at the site, raising vegetables, preparing their own meals, and immersing themselves in the complete production process of their designs. Before assembling the structure, they were guided through the steps of culling and cutting trees on the estate, drying their trunks, and transforming them into dimensional lumber and cross-laminated timber (CLT), using on-site workshops and specialized equipment. “We have always worked with the idea of learning by doing,” says Guallart. “Many students are tired of the traditional university, and they want to learn through real experience.”

The timber structure inhabits a ruined 19th-century stable. Photo © Adrià Goula, click to enlarge.

A six-axis industrial robot, housed within the building, helped with woodworking tasks. Photo © Adrià Goula

Guallart describes the resulting collaborative design as an “arboreal structure,” with seven prefabricated columns interlaced like branching trees. They are fitted together with 52 individual joints, all different, using traditional joinery techniques coupled with fabrication by one of the school’s older robots. The structural elements rise inside the stable’s surviving brick walls, which are topped and enclosed with CLT panels; their exterior face is engraved with computer-generated patterns based on the mathematical concept of voronoi tessellation diagrams. The green roof is seeded with Mediterranean plants such as honeysuckle and lavender and has an organically shaped skylight at its center that focuses natural light on the robot inside. “It’s almost as if it were the oculus of a chapel,” observes Daniel Ibáñez, IAAC’s current director.

A six-axis industrial robot, housed within the building, helped with woodworking tasks. Photo © Adrià Goula

Following this religious theme, the school has dubbed the structure CORA, or the “Cathedral of Robotic Artisans.” Noting Valldaura’s past as site of an 11th-century monastery, long since demolished, Ibáñez explains, “we liked the idea of creating a sort of temple of technologies.” This association is reinforced by the organic quality of the interior structure, which relates to Barcelona’s long tradition of religious architecture inspired by natural forms, from the Gothic and its 19th-century revivals to the exuberant structural innovations of Antoni Gaudí.

The quasi-sanctification of the new robot as a kind of contemporary idol is not entirely tongue in cheek. Echoing the messianic language of avant-garde reformers before them, Guallart and Ibáñez are quite passionate about their declared mission to prepare students and the profession as a whole for a comprehensive reshaping of architecture in the face of contemporary environmental challenges. “This is not an isolated project,” Ibáñez declares. “It is a prototype for a new generation of buildings made from materials that will be increasingly biological in origin, highly decarbonizing, industrially produced, and locally sourced.”

What can one add to this worthy aspiration but a hearty amen?

 

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