From May 21-24, ICD will host a workshop titled “Digital Dieste” in collaboration with Uruguayan architect Agustín Dieste.
The four-day workshop delves into the visionary work of Uruguayan 'brickmaster' Eladio Dieste in the 20th century. The event invites participants to reimagine Dieste’s legacy through the lens of 21st-century techniques, integrating digital fabrication and computational design. The workshop will be led by Eladio Dieste’s grandson, Agustín Dieste, alongside ICD researchers Martín Alvarez and Laura Kiesewetter.
To capitalize on tradition through cutting-edge techniques, participants will explore the translation of Dieste’s structural typologies and designs into contemporary timber solutions, leveraging novel fabrication techniques and computational modeling. The work of Eladio Dieste was developed in Uruguay from the 1940s onwards, after a humble innovation was tried with the introduction of catenary-section, reinforced ceramic vaults. Building on this basic technique, Dieste developed subsequent innovations in reinforced ceramics that allowed him to devise laminar structures with extreme span-to-thickness ratios. All these developments were based on the “laws that rule matter in balance,” as he put it, by harnessing the geometric efficiency that catenary curves allow through pure-compression laminar structures.
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