Robotics for Ecological Buildings — Final Studio Presentations

What happens when you give a robot irregular timber, natural stone, or reclaimed materials — and ask it to work with them, not against them?

That is the question at the heart of the Robotics for Ecological Buildings studio, developed by students from the Master in Advanced Architecture. Using IAAC’s future campus warehouse in Poblenou as both context and constraint, students designed and programmed robotic fabrication workflows to create custom, low-impact interventions for an existing industrial shell.

The studio pushed robotic fabrication into genuinely new territory — away from the precision of standard industrial materials and towards the unpredictability of natural ones. The result was a series of projects that explore how automation can adapt to irregular local matter, pre-existing architectural conditions, and the logic of adaptive reuse.

A different way of thinking about what robots are for.