The first edition of Navarre Innovation Week included the session ‘Innovate in Construction’, with the presentation of the BAI Institute as National Reference Center for Industrialization and Robotization in Architecture.

Around twenty leading figures in technological innovation in Navarre and in Spain participated in the event, which opened with the intervention of Juan Luis García, Counsilor of University, Innovation and Digital Transformation of the Government of Navarre, who highlighted the unique character of BAI as “key alliance between academia and business, bridging the gap between knowledge and its practical application.“

BAI’s Academic Director, Francisco Mangado, further emphasized the program’s singularity, explaining how, unlike other similar institutions, at BAI “research will come hand in hand with real projects,” with the purpose of making new technologies not a challenge for construction professionals, but “an opportunity to improve the quality of architecture and put it at the service of the true problems of society.”

For his part, Andrea Deplazes, full professor at ETH Zürich and Academic Director of BAI, showed a project that illustrates the spirit of the new center, the Monte Rosa Hut in the Swiss Alps, an architecture on the edge that would not have been possible without a series of new technologies and quality design. Deplazes also insisted on BAI’s uniqueness as center for training and research that aims to “focus on reality through real projects.” An idea also shared by Jonathan Benhamu, professor at the ETH Zürich and Research Associate at BAI, who laments how computational design technologies today are giving way to simple formal games —“flower vases of an exclusively aesthetic condtion but of no use” – and defended that the design should lead the project conception process, so that “technology follows project, and not the other way around.”