Fabricating architecture in the digital age
Digital fabrication in architecture is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging over the last 15 years to become a substantial aspect of critical debate, professional practice, and education within the discipline. Essentially, it is a subcategory of Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) since it utilizes computercontrolled machines as tools with which to cut or make parts. While still relatively novel in architecture, CAD/CAM processes have been used in engineering and industrial design for more than 50 years in the development and fabrication of cars, airplanes, and smaller consumer goods. Components are usually designed and developed with three-dimensional modeling software, and then scale models are produced using a rapid protoyping process that translates digital information into physical object. Because this type of object includes all the data from the computational model, it is often highly detailed and therefore provides a precise description of the design. This stage may be reiterated to revise the design until such a point is reached that full-size prototypes are made, either as parts in themselves or to form molds from which components are subsequently made; in either scenario, a variety of materials may be used depending on the intended purpose.
More importantly, this process has facilitated a greater fluidity between design generation, development, and fabrication than in traditional approaches, which necessitated a more cumulative, staged process. The potential to make things directly from design information has precipitated a transformation in design disciplines, as it allows the designer to engage with the entire process from concept to final product in an unprecedented manner. A significant figure in the field, Lisa Iwamoto describes this shift: “[F]or many years, as the process of making drawings steadily shifted from being analog to digital, the design of buildings did not really reflect the change. CAD replaced drawings with a parallel rule and lead pointer, but buildings looked pretty much the same. This is perhaps not so surprising—one form of two-dimensional representation simply replaced another. It took three-dimensional computer modeling and digital fabrication to energize design thinking and expand the boundaries of architectural form and construction.”7
The Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, by Frank O. Gehry & Associates. Perhaps one of the most important architectural projects with regard to digital technologies, it fueled the development of their application in the discipline, generating specific software programs in the process, as well as demonstrating their potential to a wider audience.
Digital design software has proved a valuable tool for analyzing the performance of different architectural elements, for example in the design development of the external-skin panels for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, Baku, by Zaha Hadid.
Ongoing developments in digital 3-D modeling software have produced specific platforms and bespoke plug-ins to enable complex designs to be readily translated for digital fabrication, as illustrated in this screenshot of cutting patterns for the Aurora project by Future Cities Lab.
Batwing, a prototype developed by EMERGENT/ Tom Wiscombe as part of a larger body of work concerned with creating coherent relationships between building systems through geometric and atmospheric means.
The cladding for Birmingham New Street Station by FOA will be built as a stainless-steel skin that conceals future plant areas on the roof and wraps around the existing parking garage. As the cladding cannot, for practical reasons, be related to the building’s interior, the façade responds to the exterior space, making the building an instrument for intensifying the perception of urban life.
Technical software produces glare studies for the project. Here, accumulation glare is mapped on to the southeast façades, enabling the designers to refine the articulation of the geometry as appropriate.
A full-size mock-up panel of the stainless-steel cladding system affords further development and detailed evaluation of the proposed design in both technological and aesthetic terms.
The transformations accompanying digital fabrication have typically grown from specific projects, in which design aspirations and corresponding technological innovations have pushed the development of software and manufacturing processes beyond conventional boundaries. An early advocate of such an approach was Gehry & Associates, whose adoption and development of digital tools was vital in enabling them to construct the highly complex geometry of their designs. Indeed, a watershed project in this regard was the iconic Disney Concert Hall, 1989–2003, which required the implementation of CAD/ CAM technology for its design and production. Already heavily reliant on physical modelmaking techniques to develop their intricate designs, the practice initially used such models in conjunction with a 3-D digitizer to feed data into the computer, initiating a dialogue between analog and digital models to refine the design. The critical part of this translation process lay in the practice’s adaptation of an existing software program, Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA). An established design-and-development platform within the aerospace industry, CATIA was employed here to model the building’s envelope and permitted full-size prototypes to be digitally fabricated, as data was used from the digital models to control machines that cut stone to the required geometries.
The nature and processes of making in architectural design are evolving at an unprecedented rate. Architects are keen to develop cross-disciplinary avenues of exploration from other industries—for example, this robot from the automotive sector—to test their application and opportunities.
Not only is the way we manufacture components and buildings transforming our design ideas, but their material possibilities may now also be realized like never before. The HypoSurface, developed by Mark Goulthorpe/ dECOi, is an ongoing project exploring a dynamic and interactive architectural surface and has an immediate plastic reciprocity that responds to the actions of people, challenging the typically static nature of architectural form.
Through such developments, digital technologies have advanced the architectural discourse. Not that these kinds of changes are exclusive to the discipline—quite the reverse, as the continual evolution of design, analysis, and production processes attests, challenging and augmenting existing procedures and organizations across the design and construction industries. The impetus provided by technological advances has traditionally served to improve protocols within these industries and, while certainly awe- inspiring, it is important to realize that digital tools and methods have resulted in further integration with extant techniques rather than less, as Branko Kolarevic observes: “It is intriguing to note that this emerging, technologically enabled transformation of the building industry in the ‘digital’ age has led to a much greater integration of ‘mechanical’ age processes and techniques into conceptual building design.”8 However, perhaps one of most exciting developments in this arena is the accessibility of digital design and fabrication technologies to architectural practitioners and students. Therefore, it is worth considering what we are trying to achieve before we immerse ourselves in these technologies.
