From forest to building: a year of learning by living at Valldaura

The programme starts from a problem: the built environment is responsible for around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, counting both the operation and the construction of buildings and infrastructure, and for large shares of material use, energy consumption and solid waste. Materials such as timber store carbon captured by trees through photosynthesis. Building with them, instead of materials that release carbon when they are produced, turns buildings and cities into long-term carbon stores. The programme combines past wisdom on local natural materials with today’s digital tools to make this transition happen in practice.

Valldaura Labs is a 135-hectare forested estate about 10 kilometres from the centre of Barcelona, inside Collserola Natural Park, a protected area of around 8,000 hectares. The site has a long history, from a Cistercian monastery in the 12th century and the hunting palaces of the kings of Aragon to the masia built in the late 19th century. IAAC began restoring the abandoned estate in 2008 and turned it into a research centre dedicated to the study and practice of self-sufficiency.

The masia hosts a digital fabrication lab with 3D printers, laser cutters, a six-axis robotic arm, electronics prototyping and a ceramics station, together with a carpentry workshop with industrial machines and a CNC. Most students live on campus during the first year, which creates a close, family-like community of students. Together they practise the circular bioeconomy in daily life: composting, harvesting rainwater, producing solar energy and treating every output as a resource. Accommodation at Valldaura has limited places and is paid separately from tuition; the details are on the programme page.

The forest itself is part of the lab. It is a pioneer forest less than 100 years old, dominated by pine, which makes it more vulnerable to drought, wildfire and pests. Working with ecologists and in line with the park’s management plan, the programme selects the trees whose removal improves the health of the forest and speeds up its evolution towards a more diverse hardwood forest.

Students then follow the whole timber value chain on site: felling with foresters, tracing each log with a simple code, milling boards, drying them with solar energy, planing lamellas and pressing them into glued laminated beams and cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. Because every step happens in one place, students can track the embodied carbon of each component from the first steps of a design and optimise it as the project develops. They also find new uses for by-products: one second-year thesis scanned the irregular live-edge offcuts of the logs and used a Grasshopper script to nest them into CLT panels.

1. Introduction to Self-Sufficiency. Ecological interactions such as agroecology, permaculture, hydroponics and sustainable forest management, Rhino and Grasshopper, digital fabrication, and a first design-build studio, often furniture or an installation for a real client or community group.
2. Building Design. Systems modules on thermodynamics, structures and metabolic systems for energy, water and waste, using environmental analysis tools such as Ladybug and Honeybee, and a speculative design studio for a mixed-use building at the scale of an urban block. The structures module focuses on engineered timber and is led by SUMA Arquitectura, the practice behind the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona, winner of the 2024 EUmies Award for Emerging Architecture.
3. 1:1 Construction. The whole cohort designs and builds a real building together, combining the advanced construction course, the design studio and collective construction.

Each edition builds a different structure, and together they show how the programme has grown:

• Tiny House, a small off-grid home with a pine frame, cladding made from oak that had already fallen, solar panels and an integrated water system.
• A quarantine cabin built during the pandemic with CLT from the campus press, clad in charred offcuts using the Japanese technique shou sugi ban, which protects the wood from fire, pests and water without chemicals.
• A solar greenhouse with photovoltaic glass that lets diffuse light through, where seedlings for the gardens now grow.
• An ecological observation station in the forest canopy, designed with canopy biologist Meg Lowman.
• MO.CA (Mobile Catalyst), a mobile cabin able to travel on Spanish roads, made of dowel laminated timber with no glue, nails or metal connectors. It has served as a home, a stage and a pavilion at the Manifesta festival in Barcelona, and its parts are being reused for a pavilion on IAAC’s 25-year history.
• CORA, the transformation of an old brick stable into a home for the campus robot, with a green roof and engineered timber columns supporting a cellular canopy. CORA was a finalist in the ArchDaily 2026 Building of the Year Awards.
• Forestone, the first building made for an external client and built off campus: a fire-resistant timber cabin with thick wood-fibre insulation and charred pine cladding. It is part of the Bio for Piri initiative promoted by the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera (opens in a new tab), and since early 2026 it stands at MónNatura Pirineus (opens in a new tab) in Planes de Son, Lleida.

Timber is the main structural material, because the campus is a forest and because engineered timber is the bio-based system that can scale fastest today. Other materials come in at every stage: rammed earth or cork in the urban building designs, cork insulation and poured earth or local stone foundations in the 1:1 buildings, cane pavilions on campus, and theses on mycelium or earth blocks in the second year. The Ecological Intelligence course reviews the state of research on bio-based materials, including bamboo and the different earth techniques, from adobe and compressed earth blocks to rammed earth and 3D printed earth. The logic is to go deep into one material and its whole process, so that students can apply the same way of thinking to any other natural material in their careers.

The programme admits students from different backgrounds, and the team encourages anyone curious to apply. Applicants who come from other disciplines sometimes need to strengthen technical drawing, 3D modelling or knowledge of how buildings work. The earlier they get in touch, the earlier the team can share resources to study over the summer, and a pre-course before the master starts offers hands-on training in fabrication tools, Rhino and Grasshopper. The team also suggests thinking about what you want to become after the master, so you can focus on the skills that will take you there, and can connect you with alumni who came from a similar background.

In the two-year programme, the second year is a research-driven thesis developed individually, in a pair or in a small group, on a topic of your choice aligned with natural materials, sustainability, circularity and innovation. After submitting an abstract, each student joins one thesis cluster, chosen from 3D Printing Architecture, Advanced Materials in Architecture, Algorithmic Design in Architecture, Metabolism & ecological architecture, and Robotic & Advanced Construction. A project can combine topics from different clusters: the cluster is the group you collaborate with. Depending on the topic, students work with industry partners such as KUKA, Universal Robots, Zaha Hadid Architects, Heatherwick Studio, Circular Design Factory, Autodesk, Tallfusta and Cricursa.

Graduates follow three main paths. Some work in architecture and engineering practices such as Snøhetta, BIG, EMBT, Carlo Ratti Associati, Gensler, Ricardo Bofill, Urbanitree, StructureCraft and ecoLogicStudio. Others go into research and consultancy, with PhDs or research roles at institutions such as the University of Cambridge and Leibniz University Hannover, or humanitarian work with organisations such as Green Cross. A third group founds their own architecture, design or ceramics studios, using the ability to take a project from raw material to finished building. Meet more graduates on the IAAC Alumni page (opens in a new tab).