Pablo Alonso and Ana María Peral
1 February 2018 – 19 July 2019
Pablo Alonso (principal investigator, deceased on 26 November 2018) was an incredibly creative person with a passion for knowledge, who knew how to enjoy the technology of his time like few others, and to contribute to its development and dissemination, with a special sensitivity towards reducing the environmental impact of any human activity.
Her broad and varied training was shaped by her interests: music, Egyptology, pedagogy, geology, art, history, computer science, photography… and above all her passion for architecture. Pablo and Ana (eventual collaborator of the project and now responsible for the collection of information) met at the E.T.S.A.M. in Madrid as students, when they collaborated in the ONGD Ingeniería Sin Fronteras (Engineering Without Borders).
After finishing their studies, Ana moved to her hometown: Elche. Pablo left his studies to form a company there to develop his many ideas: ‘Arquimed Innovaciones Aplicadas a la Arquitectura S.L.’ with which he collaborated in two projects that won architectural competitions: the Institute of Ecology of the Coast and the Social Centre of El Campello (Alicante).
In 2012 they moved to Asturias, Pablo’s birthplace, where he found the right environment to develop his many interests.
Project in residence
Parametric & Sustainable ArchIoTectures
Parametric, Connected and Sustainable Environments and Architectures
How will the definitive implementation of the Internet of Things, the development of new materials and construction methods or the use of technologies such as collective mixed reality affect buildings and cities? How do we deal with the design of these built or virtual environments?
With conventional design, the architect applies his science and art to define the form of the building. The computer becomes a sophisticated drawing board that saves time and money. With parametric design tools, the architect will program the rules that the project must comply with and it is the computer that will generate the forms and develop the construction details or virtual spaces.
The Archiotecture project proposed by Pablo Alonso and Ana María Peral reflects on these aspects and draws on more than twenty years of experience designing sustainable buildings, teaching computer-aided design at university and using sophisticated architectural design and visualisation tools.
It consists of two parts. In the first, an algorithm is developed based on parametric design software that will help architects to generate in minutes new forms that would not be possible to design with traditional design programmes and methods, both for physical and virtual use. In the second, the algorithm is applied to the design of various architectural elements that will be shown physically (life-size or to scale) and through advanced visualisation technologies such as virtual reality or augmented reality.
