New days of training and dissemination of traditional techniques and trades

Through the School of Craft Trades of KALAM, EOAK, we participate and organize days of dissemination of knowledge about traditional techniques and crafts. Victor Carnero, Director of Procedures and Head of EOAK, was in charge of sharing with the attendees of the last edition of the Summer School on Traditional Architecture the experience of our company in this area.

Last July, a new edition of the Summer School on Traditional Architecture was held, organized by the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism, INTBAU, and the Rafael Manzano Award. This initiative is coordinated by Alejandro García Hermida, director of INTBAU initiatives in Spain and Portugal and CEO of KALAM in the United States. On this occasion, the school took place at Can Catá, a masia located in the Collserola mountain range, in Cerdanyola del Vallès, a location close to the city of Barcelona.

Among all the activities included in the program and carried out by the students, those related to hand drawing and measuring buildings stood out. In addition, attendees also analyzed the local traditional urban planning, along with architecture and construction details. All this focusing, in this past edition, on the generation of a catalog of traditional construction solutions.

During the last days of the meeting, the students dedicated themselves to the creation, in a collaborative way among all of them, of proposals for updating different parts of the masia, for its gardens and for some areas adjacent to the Church of Sant Iscle i Santa Victòria. All of them focused on the work developed in the previous days, serving as a guide for the different approaches.

KALAM’s participation

In addition to the previous activities, several conferences were held on topics related to local vernacular architecture and different construction techniques. Víctor Carnero, Director of Procedures and Head of KALAM’s School of Craft Trades, EOAK, was in charge of sharing with the participants some of the experiences that our company develops around training, the preservation of traditional crafts and the restoration of heritage. The EOAK is in charge of training and updating knowledge both for KALAM’s own team and for external learners through workshops, courses or conferences.

Victor Carnero commented that, thanks to this training initiative, at KALAM we aim to preserve traditional trades and techniques, in order to achieve an adequate subsequent conservation of our historic buildings.

In the presentation, Carnero also showed various actions carried out by our team, as well as the activity performed by KALAM related to the dissemination of knowledge: from the edition and writing of books on cultural heritage, to the traditional construction and restoration of buildings and monuments, as well as the organization of an International Symposium related to Safety in Heritage.

Training in crafts trades, essential for the preservation of the Heritage

At the same time, Carnero took the opportunity to show the importance of theoretical and practical training in trades that can lead to specialized training, which is essential for proper heritage preservation.

Our company participates periodically in frameworks such as this Summer School, among other academic or formative ones. In addition, on many occasions we do so through the realization of practical workshops, where master craftsmen share their skills, for example, in relation to the execution of traditional coatings, and also to the techniques of molding and reproduction of ornaments and architectural elements, or construction with adobe, among other practices.

A good example of these workshops is the one carried out within the framework of the training provided by Patrimonio Nacional in its Workshop Schools and Employment Workshops. In it KALAM spread the knowledge of the traditional coatings in order that the student workers who were being trained in the training specialties of woodworking and gilding had a cross-cutting training to help them improve their competences and professional skills. On this occasion, the theoretical part dealt with the general characteristics of these coatings, giving way to a practical demonstration of the execution of different stucco techniques and especially of the process of making a stencil and sgraffito.