Pneumatic Serendipity

year: 2010-present location: madrid, alicante and aarhus type: workshop universities: escuela técnica superior de arquitectura UPM, escuela de arquitectura de alicante UA, aarhus school of architecture AAA tutors: antonio cobo UPM, josé miguel de prada poole UPM, izabela wieczorek AAA, javier sáchez merina UA

The word serendipity refers to the search of something interesting, by chance, or to the ability to recognize a discovery, even when it has no exactly relation to what you are looking for. The workshop "Pneumatic Serendipity" intentionally seeks the coincidence, the accident, in order to establish new relationships, building prototypes. Therefore, we proposed a spontaneous exercise of exploration and analysis that will lead students to reflect on shape, structure and construction in architectural design. These are all issues that are not only inseparable in pneumatic structures but - thanks to them - you might put into question the very idea of living and of thinking about architecture nowadays. In order to create a collective consciousness of the proposed exercise, we come back to some questions that encouraged the Radical Architecture discussions of the '60s and '70s, when there were a full openness to this kind of experimentations. The project itself will encourage the discussion about the issues of that context, rethinking them at the light of the transformation of the digital and community 2.0 era: technology in relation to the thickness or lightness, the social revolution, the architecture of protest and the pop-up architecture, the energy crisis and the energy in the architectural design.

For any further information:

PnS Research Project
www.pneumaticserendipity.com