Sketches

2 minute exterior - Law Building

5 minute interior - Law Building

5 minute exterior - Law Building

2 minute interior - Law Building

Week 1 Blog Post

Chosen Readings:

1. Kolarevic, B. (2003). Information Master Builders. Architecture in the digital age : design and manufacturing. B. Kolarevic. New York, NY, Spon Press: 55-62.
2. Mitchell, W. (2003). Design Worlds and Fabrication Machines. Architecture in the digital age : design and manufacturing. B. Kolarevic. New York, NY, Spon Press: 73-80.
3.  Starkey, B. (2005). "Architectural models: material, intellectual, spiritual." Arq : Architectural Research Quarterly 9(3-4): 265-272.

All three readings focused on the use of materials in architectural design, how these materials were manufactured and manipulated into actual components and what type of computational design modelling techniques were used to design these complex designs that required new materials and machines to allow a physical object to be made. 

Kolarevic explains in the text 'Architecture in the digital age: design and manufacturing', how Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Hall was the first structure to comprehensively use CAD/CAM technology to produce the architectural stonework (before a metal appearance was decided). Kolarevic then begins to describe multiple processes of manufacturing, such as, CNC milling, additive fabrication, contour crafting, and formative fabrication. 

Ultimately, his message is "that in the not so distant future architects will directly transmit the design information to a construction machine that will automatically assemble a complete building". This was already happening in Japan by a company known as SMART (Shimizu Manufacturing system by Advanced Robotics Technology). In addition, he says "the realities of economic and social constraints in the building industry simply mean that the processes of change will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary", strongly conveying to readers that the world of construction and how it works will drastically change over the next few decades. 

Furthermore, all texts describe how parametric designs allowed designers to create sophisticated tessellation patterns, allowing the geometry and min max size to be determined of the patches within a tessellated design, using the British Museum Great Court as an example.