Valldaura Estate
The Valldaura Estate is located in the Collserola park, 15 minutes from Barcelona. The 3000 m2 main mansion is surrounded by 134 hectares of forest and is the home of a Self-Sufficient Lab as well as a Green Fab Lab.
The estate is part of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia with the purpose of developing a prototype of a self-sufficient habitat.
Green Fab Lab
The Green Fab Lab works towards the creation of a self-sufficient habitat and research centre at Valldaura. It has laboratories for the production of energy, food and things and develops projects and academic programmes in association with Harvard and MIT. Learn more about the lab.
Valldaura Society is a membership program for innovative companies and organisations in the Barcelona area which offers access to the Valldaura estate, mansion and labs. This invite only program is available to organisations that are aligned with our core values. Learn more.
Get Inspired!
This fantastic article, complete with great photography and videos, gives a unique insight into what Valldaura is all about. Go read it now over on Medium.
We need your help to make Valldaura into a prototype for self-sufficient habitat, an open and global community to invent the future of our cities. We need you!
What is Valldaura?
Valldaura self-sufficient labs is a project of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia aimed at developing a prototype of a self-sufficient habitat in the Collserola Park, located in the municipality of Cerdanyola, a close neighbour to the city of Barcelona.
We aim to achieve our first goal of raising 100.000 EUROS before the end of September 2016, to demonstrate that this project is also economically feasible. And it is for this that we would much appreciate your economic contribution as well as the sharing and broadcasting of the project.
The main objective is the creation of a student and researchers community that will have an immersive experience, striving to produce all necessary resources to live inside this community, while documenting every step and sharing the knowledge created out of this process.
It is in this way that we want to contribute in the defining of a new future of the human habitat, based on local production of resources and global connectivity, through the merger of ancestral knowledge and cutting edge technologies.
A community towards achieving self-sufficiency
The project will grow and develop with the collaboration of businesses and organisations, but will also rely on the vast community of volunteers and associates that share the same values as us and actively participate in making that common vision a reality.
We want to create three Labs: a laboratory of digital fabrication that will use only local resources (wood, earth, minerals and waste), an energy lab that will focus on new ways of harvesting, storing and managing energy in a distributed manner (wind power, photovoltaic, biomass, etc.) and a food lab that is focused on producing all needed food using both traditional systems and new technologies for production.
In Valldaura we aim to contribute to the conservation of the Collserola Natural Park and the recapturing of the Valldaura historical patrimony, that has since its founding in 1150 been governed by monks, nobles, industrials, and now investigators.
Fighting against climate change
In this way we want to prove that it is possible to work using as a base concrete projects to change the history of the cities and of the territory, a change that can have an impact in the fight against climate change and support citizen empowerment through the potential of the emerging technologies out of the digital revolution.
In the following years, we will work to make this project a reality through educational programs, open events, and activities to society and the neighbouring community and build the infrastructure that will make this vision a reality.
Your help is essential
In short, in Valldaura there is an urgent need to create more spaces dedicated to research, as well as spaces dedicated to housing, infrastructure for the energy production, construction materials, communication platforms, as well as an implementation of a very extensive project of the property’s roads rehabilitations, roads that through their historical patrimony will generate knowledge that will later be shared both locally and globally.
We need your help to make Valldaura into a prototype for self-sufficient habitat, an open and global community to invent the future of our cities. We need you!
