Week 10: Digital fabrications and robotics

Digital fabrication technologies have revived the link between architect and builder. Through robotics, highly complex and large scale designs are being created. This lecture will discuss the reconnection of design and construction and the roles of making.

In the emerging architecture of the digital era, more architectural designs are materialized digital information- designed and documented with digital software, fabricated with digitally controlled machinery and assembled on site using digital technology. Architecture has evolved significantly into the digitally driven type of architecture.

Douglas Engelbart claimed he invented the mouse and claimed that it was necessary that humans required the act of communicating with each other in real time to increase human intelligence. This idea grew into a concept that involved the growth between computers and humans to become submerged within each other so that the human would metaphorically become the prosthetic. Which therefore led to the development of the mouse as an initial attempt at ‘co-evolving’ into this futuristic concept.

Wigley has suggested that the mouse has to be both part of the computer, as computers are previously define as a large, inorganic machines. The rise of personal computing and the inclusion of the mouse in 1982 created a much more friendly experience. We are dependent on what we see on the screen of virtual world, whereby the sensitivity starts to blur the distinction between reality and virtual “two organisms into one, allowing the electrical signals in the nervous system to simulate and be simulated by the electrical signal in the computer.

References:

Wigley, M (2010), "The Architecture of the Mouse", Architectural Design: EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, vol.80, no.6, pp. 50-57.

Week9: Materiality

Architectural and construction manufacturing industries have been exposed with new technologies, and transforming modern designer and architects to explore new materiality disregarded the complexity of its shape and form and sending the responsibilities to engineers. When we consider materiality, we are then exposed with morphogenesis, define as growth and evolutionary development, which generates systems that derive complex articulation, specific gestalt and performative capacity through the interaction of material characteristics, as well as external stimuli of environmental forces and influences.

Evolving the understanding of material systems through the embedding of material characteristics, geometric behaviour, manufacturing constraints and assembly logics within an integral computational model promotes an understanding of form, material, structure and behaviour as a series of complex interrelations. All these complex forms and system that’s define by materiality would be impossible to realize without the use of digital modelling, coding and visual scripting, as designers and architects are able to collaborate with other professions in order to understand material composition and simulation accuracy. Thus an integrative process is required to enable design innovation as well as driving better outcomes.

Materiality are also define as Growth of the individual instance: Utilising the internal dataset/growth rules or genotype, or the variable gestalt resulting from the interaction of the genotype to the environment or phenotype.  In reality we are miss perception the reality of architecture by limiting our visualisation in two common ways, one is to see the building as a system of components and being realized by construction, second is to view it as a system of representations outlined in composition and experienced in perception. Both make the building into an object, Therefore, material effect are by fact is the performative aspect of the building performance.

References:

Menges, A. (2011). Integral Foundation and materialisation: Computational Form and Material Gesault, Computational design thinking AD reader. A. Menges and S. Ahlquist. Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons: 198-210. 

Trummer, P. (2011). Associative Design: From Type to Population. Computational design thinking AD reader. A. Menges and S. Ahlquist. Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons: 179-197.  

Kolarevic, B. and K. R. Klinger (2008). Manufacturing/ Material/ Effects. Manufacturing material effects : rethinking design and making in architecture. B. Kolarevic and K. R. Klinger. New York,  Routledge: 5-24.  

Bernstein, P. G., A. Inc and Y. University (2008). Thinking versus Making: Remediating Design Practice in the Age of Digital Representation. Manufacturing material effects : rethinking design and making in architecture. B. Kolarevic and K. R. Klinger. New York, Routledge: 61-66.