The aim of this programme is to rehabilitate environments, populations and materials through the use of innovative computational ecological design and digital fabrication processes.

With these tactics we will define a new generation of digital design that employs both high-tech and low-tech strategies. Parametric design generation and digital fabrication techniques will be used to computationally redesign low-tech building strategies, mixing high-tech exper­tise with local labour knowledge. One objective of the workshop is to transform sustainable design strategies so as to bring to ecological design a new aesthetic and social agenda.

This high-tech/low-tech strategy will include environmental registration and mediation, using high-tech agent-controlled computational design and environmental and structural simulation, to design both high-tech and low-tech environmental mediation systems. The workshop will script the calibration of devices to respond to multiple forces – structural and cultural as well as environmental forces. The goal is to create spatial organisations for various programmes, settings and building types, using different structured environmental devices and networking them within larger cultural and ecological systems of the urban setting.

The workshop will be a part of the FILE - Electronic Language International Festival, a yearly forum for avant-garde digital art in the iconic FIESP building. Open to architecture and design profes­sionals and students, the studio-based workshop will include instruction in para­metric modelling, environmental simulation software, Rhino Grasshopper, GECO, Kanga­roo and Galapagos, as well as Processing and Arduino, and digital fabrication proc­esses using laser-cutting and CNC-milling machines to produce design proposals, physical models and one-to-one prototypes. The course will be taught by tutors from the AA School, including Robert Stuart Smith of Kokkugia, Anne Save de Beaurecueil from SUBdV and Sandro Tubertini from Environmental Engineering Agency, BDSP. It will also feature lectures by Brazilian and international architects, urban planners and other specialists.

Lecture and schedule in PDF

Video of 2010 workshop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0QkkKl_xaE