Patxi Mangado: "The future of construction is going to be more with industrialists than with builders, and many people don't like this"
Foto: © gramazio kohler research, ETH zurich
In the radio show ‘Más de uno Pamplona’ we had the opportunity to share a few minutes with the architect Patxi Mangado, academic director of BAI, the Center for Industrialization and Robotics Applied to Construction and Architecture.
A center, in Mangado's words, “for training and research, an academic institute, therefore, that fully trusts that it is through knowledge that we can contribute to the control of very powerful techniques,” and he adds that “the fundamental objective is to make the best architecture possible, not only the architecture that technology is capable of creating.” He insists that the best architects today have to master these techniques, but they also have to be at the service of ideas, thoughts, and values.
The institute will offer a two-year postgraduate course, open to around fifty architects or engineers, “a reduced institute so that the most capable people can enter, not those who have more money; so we are going to try to offer scholarships, but it will be a demanding selection process.”
Patxi Mangado explained that it is "a public institute but also a private foundation, and what we want is to make a living from the institute's own work. We are going to work on real projects, so the training that students who are already professionals will receive will be based on actual projects; therefore, whatever they generate serves for their tuition."
It has been years of work during which they have had the support of the Spanish Government and, above all, the Government of Navarre, which lead this project with an international outreach.
