Courses, News
Additive Tectonics
“When a structural concept has found its implementation through construction, the visual result will affect us through certain expressive qualities which clearly have something to do with the play of forces and corresponding arrangement of parts in the building, yet cannot be described in terms of construction and structure alone. For these qualities, which are expressive of a relation of form to force, the term tectonic should be reserved.”
— Eduard F. Sekler (1960), “Structure, Construction, Tectonics”, in Structure in Art and in Science.
Description
Advances in computational design methods and fabrication techniques provide new possibilities for architectural designers to consider different paradigms for design and making. These paradigms emphasize the relationship between formation and materialization. Through robotic additive manufacturing, designers can construct buildings or building elements quickly.
The studio “Additive Tectonics” explored the tectonic expression of additive manufacturing in different architectural contexts, from constructing affordable housing with earth materials to investigating the construction of settlements on other planets. The studio focused on the exploration of such architectural tectonics as an abstracted skin or wall system; a tower or a column as a structural element; a vault or a shell as a roof system; a hut or a shed; or other, new building tectonics. One-to-one structures were designed for the North Terrace at the University of Virginia’s Campbell Hall.
Students explored additive tectonics through three stages. The material system development stage demonstrated various materials—such as bio-based, bio-degradable, or bioplastic materials—and their properties and limitations in additive manufacturing. In computational design development, students considered the material properties and fabrication constraints in prototyping. Finally, robotic additive construction—which can be defined as abstraction, formation, rationalization, and materialization to explore novel tectonics—enabled students to execute their design prototype to examine their design’s tectonic potential in building an architectural element.
A series of integrative workshops supported this studio. Formation workshops introduced Grasshopper as a CAD software that can be used for form generation. Materialization workshops presented students with a numerical-based fabrication process. Students learned to control an industrial robotic arm and 3D-print tectonic prototypes.
Image Credit
E. Baharlou, University of Virginia, 2021.
Courses, News
Introduction to Cognitive Design and Fabrication
“The manifest form—that which appears—is the result of a computational interaction between internal rules and external (morphogenetic) pressures that, themselves, originate in other adjacent forms (ecology). The (pre-concrete) internal rules comprise, in their activity, an embedded form, what is today clearly understood and described by the term algorithm.”
— Who is afraid of formalism?, Sanford Kwinter.
Description
Advances in design computation methods and fabrication techniques provide new possibilities for designers to consider different paradigms for design and making. These paradigms emphasize the relationship between formation and materialization. Form manifestation can be investigated through behavioral, emotional, and cognitive approaches. Cognitive and emotional design approaches center humanity in production processes to address their needs. The implication of human-centered design methods will change the production of goods from mass-production and mass-customization to more personalized manufacturing. This new form of industrial thinking challenges disciplines such as architectural design to profoundly investigate innovative design approaches and fabrication techniques.
The elective course “Introduction to Cognitive Design and Fabrication” introduced students to cognitive design principles, computational design processes, and additive manufacturing techniques. After learning the principles of cognitive design, students developed their own design that applied these principles to the design of “Everyday Things”. This included, for example, items essential to responding to COVID-19, such as face masks, safety glasses, and face shields. In addition, students were introduced to additive manufacturing techniques such as 3D-printing and robotic additive manufacturing to materialize their design.
This course included two workshops. The first, on computational design, discussed integrative computational tools, such as Autodesk Fusion 360, to sketch, design, simulate, and manufacture a design concept. The second workshop focused on robotic 3D-printing and introduced advanced robotic controls to explore experimental robotic fabrication in design.
Selected Project
SMASK: A Smart Mask for Amid/Post-COVID | Developed by: Meng Huang and Xun Liu
Image Credit
L. Aldinger, C. Arias, S. Katz, ICD, University of Stuttgart, 2015/16.
Courses, News
Wood Proto-architecture I: Integrating Design Computation and Materialization
“It is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter.”
— A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Description
The advanced research studio “Wood Proto-architecture: Integrating Design Computation and Materialization” investigated the generative potential of material and fabrication agencies in [proto-]architecture. Considering these agencies within tectonic systems requires an understanding of material organization and fabrication systems in interaction with environmental effectiveness. This studio explored computational methods to amalgamate these active agencies into design processes. The aim was to explore integrative design computation, which unfolds specific material gestalt and related performative capacities without differentiating between processes of computational form generation and physical materialization. This integrative process is a prototypical exploration to study the emergence of a tectonic form.
The studio introduced students to the concept of integrative design computation in architecture. This concept is two-fold: developing material systems and exploring related fabrication tools. The proposed material system was wood, which has high performance and adaptation. Students investigated the anisotropic nature of wood to understand tectonic potentials of wood morphology in design processes. Concurrent with developing material systems, students explored the potential of digital fabrication tools, such as Industrial Robots or CNC machines, as a generative driver in design processes.
The synthesis of these two agencies was further explored by developing a computational design framework to minimize the gap between formation and materialization. To achieve this, students developed computational design strategies and conducted a series of small-scale experiments. Students then refined their experiments and applied them to prototyping a scaled tectonic installation. The studio was supported by the elective course “Introduction to Computational Design and Construction,” which introduced students to computational design methods and digital fabrication processes.
Selected Project
Self-Forming Hygrosensitive Tectonics | Developed by: Yin-Yu Fong, Kirk Gordon, Nicholas Grimes, Mengzhe Ye
Image Credit
M. Alvarez and E. Martínez, University of Stuttgart, 2016.
