Co-creating together: Ibero-American emergent collaborations in architecture and digital manufacture

Abstract

Innovative technologies for digital design and manufacture have spread with globalization, providing improved working tools and processes for architecture. These technologies open up different professional opportunities, forging alternative relations with society, especially for new generations and emerging countries. This article reflects on novel collaborative experiences between Ibero-American Universities, accounting for the intensive use of digital technologies in architecture. To bridge technological gaps, the authors describe collaborative efforts to produce full-size constructions, using networking, which results in a hybridization of these “new media” adapted to local and cultural contexts. These initiatives arise from an attempt to overcome the lack of resources at local Universities and their rigid institutional processes, along with their concerns about promoting global connectivity for new generations, leading to informal and collective actions that break with traditional teaching, applying advanced techniques in unseen collective and creative processes. These experiences reveal an architectural work distributed among all the participants that collaborate in the conceptualization, programming, management, and execution of the design, with diverse hybrid practices, and a powerful collective synergy. This also results in new expanded proposals that unfold new relationships with the environment and the community. Thus, these actions tend, by themselves, to integrate and project new horizons in architectural collaboration. This article aims at mapping these spatial-temporal actions in Architecture from the global south (Santos 2014).