Vincente Guallart - Barcelona, the selfsufficient networked city

Conference on Architecture, European Urbanisation and Globalisation

Vicente Guallart has since July 2011 been Barcelona City Council’s Chief Architect and Director of Urban Habitat, with responsibility for Urbanism, Environment, Infrastructure and ICT. In recent years his firm, Guallart Architects, has carried out numerous architectural projects in which environment issues converge with information technologies, notably for the ports of Fugee and Keelung in Taiwan, the Sociopolis neighbourhood in Valencia and the Sharing Blocks in Gandia. He has been director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) since its founding in 2001 and ran the IAAC Media House project (in conjunction with the CBA at MIT), which won the 2002 Ciutat de Barcelona prize. In 2010 he co-directed the Fab Lab House project, winner of the Solar Decathlon Europe Audience Award. In 1992 he won a FAD award for a private house in the historic centre of Barcelona. He has been invited on three occasions to show in the official Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, with the Barcelona Metapolis, Denia Artificial Mountain and Hyperhabitat projects. In 2006 he was selected for the MOMA’s On Site exhibition in New York. He has lectured at a number of universities worldwide, including MIT, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard GSD. He is co-author of several books, such as the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture, and the author of Geologics