BARCELONA.- Architect Vicente Guallart presented a housing prototype that integrates the physical and digital worlds created in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia which will be shown in September at the main pavilion of the XI Venice Architectural Exhibition.

The architect and his team built a 1:1 scale prototype plan of a housing building for young people with shared spaces and connected through an information system to the world.

The idea is to demonstrate that in order to make a more self sufficient world with decentralized networks, the functional relationships between the different elements of the habitability networks need to be redesigned.

For the project's development an interdisciplinary team has been formed with Guallart Architects, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, The Center for Bits and Atoms from MIT, which along professionals and enterprises related to technological development, such as Bestiario, will make the installation.

The IAAC is an international centre of education and research that focuses on architecture understood as a discipline that encompasses different scales, ranging from territorial analysis, urban development, architectural projects and digital fabrications to informational environments.

Located in Barcelona, one of the international capitals of Urbanism, the institution develops a multidisciplinary program that explores urban and international territorial phenomena, placing especial emphasis on the opportunities that emerges from developing countries and the cultural, economic and social values that architecture may contribute to society.

The IAAC offers a three-term Master programme in Architecture and Urbanism jointly organized with the Fundació Politécnica de Catalunya and directed by Vicente Guallart, Willy Müller and Marta Malé-Alemany. The programme proposes an innovative format that allows the students to create their own academic agenda in an open structure of studios and seminars, based on territorial, urbanistic, architectural and parametrical approaches to design research.

Besides the educational program Iaac develops its research program in collaboration with external experts, invited architects, researchers and former participants of the master program.

Some of the most important projects and publications done by Iaac recently are Hipercatalunya (a research about the territory of Catalonia) The Media House (a project developed with the MIT's Media Lab) and the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture.

In addition to research programmes and international projects, the agenda is completed with lectures, excursions, exhibitions, publications and competitions.