Digital Fabrications

Digital Fabrications, the second volume in our new Architecture Briefs series, celebrates the design ingenuity made possible by digital fabrication techniques. Author Lisa Iwamoto explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold. Digital Fabrications presents projects designed and built by emerging practices that pioneer techniques and experiment with fabrication processes on a small scale with a do-it-yourself attitude. Featured architects include AEDS/Ammar Eloueini, Atelier Manferdini, Brennan Buck, MOS, Office dA, Florencia Pita/MOD, Mafoomby, URBAN A+O, SYSTEMarchitects, Andrew Kudless/Matsys, IwamotoScott, Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Chris Bosse, Tom Wiscombe/EMERGENT, Thom Faulders Architecture, Jeremy Ficca, SPAN, GNUFORM, Heather Roberge, PATTERNS, Ruy Klein, and servo.

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask, how do we characterize our post-digital design labor? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products. From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviors, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

With the increasing sophistication of CAD and other design software, there is now a wide array of means for both designing and fabricating architecture and its components. The proliferation of advanced modelling software and hardware has enabled architects and students to conceive and create designs that would be very difficult to do using more traditional methods. The use of CAD technologies in the production of physical models, prototypes and individual elements is increasingly widespread through processes such as CAD/CAM, CNC milling and rapid prototyping. This translation of computer-generated data to physical artefact can also be reversed with devices such as a digitiser, which traces the contours of physical objects directly into the computer. This book focuses on the inspiring possibilities for architecture that can be explored with all the different technologies and techniques available for making complete designs or their components.

Author Christopher Beorkrem shows how material performance drives the digital fabrication process and determines technique. He has recreated and dissected thirty-six of the most progressive works of architecture of the last few years, with perspectives from the designers so that you can learn from the successes and failures of each project. Including step-by-step diagrams and using consistent language and the simplest construction techniques, he identifies the important characteristics of each material, including connection types, relative costs, deformation, color, texture, finish, dimensional properties, durability, and weathering and waterproofing to link the design outcomes to form. The book is divided into five parts by material – wood, metal, concrete, hybrids, and recycled – to help you reference construction techniques for the fabrication machines you have on-hand.

Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure draws together emerging topics of making that span primary forms of craftsmanship to digital fabrication in order to theoretically and practically analyze the innovative and interdisciplinary relationship between digital fabrication technology and interior design. The history of making in interior design is aligned with traditional crafts, but a parallel discourse with digital fabrication has yet to be made evident. This book repositions the praxis of experimental prototyping and integrated technology to show how the use of digital fabrication is inherent to the interior scales of body, objects and enclosure. These three scales act as a central theme to frame contributions that reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of interior design and reinterpret traditional crafts by integrating new methods of making into conventional workflows. Featuring significant international practitioners and researchers, the selected contributions represent the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of design, demonstrating a breadth of disciplines. A foundational text for interiors students and practitioners, Digital Fabrication in Interior Design expands the necessary dialogue about digital fabrication at the scale of interiors to inform design theory and practice.

This book explores the connection between digital fabrication and the design build studio in both academic and professional studios. The book presents 17 essays and cases studies from well-known scholars and practitioners, including Kengo Kuma, Joseph Choma, Dan Rockhill, Keith Zawistowski, and Marie Zawistowski, whose theoretical and practical work addresses design build at various levels. Four introductory essays trace the history of the design build movement, exploring the emergence of design build in the pedagogy of the Bauhaus, the integration of technology into architectural design, and the influence of the act of making on the design build studio. The rest of the book is divided into two parts; the first part looks at traditional pedagogical models for the design build studio, and the second part focuses on experimental methods used in design build programs. Together, these works discuss human behavior, social-cultural trends, and motivations in socially minded studios which are based on a service-learning model. They look at component-based studios where innovation allows for an increased level of research and testing of new materials and assemblies, sustainable principles, and zero-energy prototypes. Illustrated with over 200 color images, this book will be a valuable resource for architecture students, educators, and practitioners seeking to explore the impact of digital fabrication on the global design build movement.

In this increasingly digitized world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of fabrication. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, digital design remains a fluid concept, its development and current influence discussed in scattered articles.

Future Cities For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world's population lives in urban regions. Cities are the largest, most complex, and most dynamic man-made systems. They are vibrant centers of cultural life and engines that drive the global economy. Contemporary cities are environmentally, socially, and economically unsustainable. The quality of urban life is threatened by such factors as pollution, rising temperatures, limited resources, congestion, social inequalities, aging of large sectors of the world population, poverty, informality, crime, and economic imbalances. The overall planning of future cities is a challenge that can only be faced by interdisciplinary teams combining multitudes of backgrounds and expertise. eCAADe "Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe" eCAADe covers Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Western Asia and works in collaboration with the four other major international associations in the field: ACADIA , ASCAAD, CAADRIA, CAADFutures and SIGRADI. eCAADe has collaborated with these associations to devise an exciting international Journal for the field called the International Journal of Architectural Computing or short IJAC.