Studio BAM

Category: Writing

  • Making in Mixed Reality

    Fologram

    Making in Mixed Reality

    Since Microsoft and Magic Leap announced their respective headset technologies in 2017, there has been a lot of hype surrounding Mixed Reality. The ability to overlay human-readable information over a visible experience of the physical world provides a more versatile connection between the digital and physical than our current screen interfaces. I recently tried the Hololens in a workshop organised to demonstrate its use in hand making material prototypes. The workshop was hosted by Eduardo Barata and Dagmar Reinhart at Sydney University Architecture school and was enabled by the Fologram team and their software.

    Mixed reality differs slightly from Augmented Reality — AR (virtual objects placed within a pixelated representation of reality) and varies a lot from Virtual Reality — VR (a complete virtual image) by projecting an image onto a transparent screen in front of your eyes. The effect is natural on the eyes as the extra information is added to the typical view of the world. For architecture this has many benefits;

    Architectural Representation

    Mixed reality coupled with a three-dimensional model can project virtual geometry into space, the effect is a new type of architectural representation. Instead of describing architecture through flat drawings or pixelated screens, a virtual form becomes part of the visual aspect and adjusts the position of the head in space. The overlay of three-dimensional digital information provides a real-time relationship between the physical context and the digital model and produces a 3d experience rather than just a 3d representation. From the perspective of architecture, a 3d and therefore spatial representation is beneficial to accurately show where to place and join materials into a structure and to present an experience of architecture before it has been materialised. What is more, many Hololens headsets can exist in the same model meaning multiple people can join in the construction or experience.

    Multimodal design interaction

    Once this pipeline of Hololens communicating with Fologram (running within Rhino and Grasshopper) has been established, opportunities for innovation exist in the way users can interact with the model in space through gestures, and through how geometry is processed within the Rhino and Grasshopper environments. The passing of data between the digital and physical environments through the Hololens creates a cyber-human-physical system. A possible scenario for this is a human response to geometry in space, an element is adjusted via a machine recognisable gesture, which subsequently recalculates the virtual geometry within a parametric model, then feeds back into the virtual overlay. The outcome here is that within a design environment set up by the Hololens and Fologram virtual and material form can co-emerge through human aesthetic decisions, and computed material behaviours.

    Construction Complexity

    Applications of the Fologram system are already being explored through university design studios and construction projects. In such experiments, mixed reality has enabled faster or more complex structures to be achieved through the externalisation of information onto the context. The 1:1 virtual overlay of a dynamic digital model means that tasks previously requiring high levels of tacit material knowledge and craft skill can be done by anyone with hands and arms.

    Material Outcomes

    In the marketing communication of Fologram, the most significant benefit from mixed reality is the quality of material outcomes coupled with a reduction in time for the humans in the cybernetic loop. The promise of increased material products and reduction of time from increased efficiency in energy expenditure reminds me of the Taylorist promise of early twentieth century mechanical production.

    The potential of mixed reality is for a greater balance in human action and computational calculation which helps to reconcile human craft with the digital that has come to alienate the more tactile based architectural practitioners. However the assemblage of material through procedural information rather than cognitive processes removes an experience from the human for the benefit of the object, this needs considering more critically. What’s more the transfer of ability onto multiple humans through information introduces a political imbalance between the producer of the digital system and those tasked with its assembly. Both of these issues will be considered in more depth in the second half of this post.

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  • Knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

    Knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

    Sydney’s most famous Brutalist building and most high profile affordable housing sits in an area called the Rocks, known as the original settlement of the city.

    The Sirius Building — source architectureau.com

    History characterises the Rocks as a struggle between workers and capitalists, the local community of low-income families battling the economic value found in its proximity to the harbour and business district. In previous battles the local community fought off the desire for new commercial and residential property through worker power through a mobilisation of the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) into Green Bans protest, reducing the ability of the wealthy and powerful to demolish the area. The Green Bans occurred in 1968, and the idea that the Rocks existed as an area of protected built and natural environment remained, that is until 2014 when Pru Goward, a minister in the New South Wales state government, decided to sell all the public housing of the Rocks. The reasons this decision were extremely economic centric, that the sale would produce capital to produce more public housing, and that it would reduce the cost of maintaining historic building stock. While the Green Bans countered economic forces of material demolition, in 2014 these forces pivoted to social demolition due to the heritage protection placed on much of the Rocks area, however with one special case, the Sirius building.

    Goward’s sale included Tao Goffer’s social housing, the Sirius building, constructed in 1978–79 in response to the forced displacement of residents due to pockets of demolition the green bans were unable to stop. The Sirius is an example of brutalist-style architecture and inspired by the ideas of growth found in the Japanese Metabolists and in particular Moshe Safdie’s project Housing 67. The timing of Goward’s decision in 2014 came as the Sirius building had no protection as had no official heritage significance. The choice of the state government, therefore, came under attack from two directions, a social concern directed towards the forced removal of residents to gain economic access to their housing, and an architectural one against the destruction of a building with cultural significance.

    On the 2nd of July 2019, the NSW government announced that it had sold the Sirius building to a developer and that Sydney architects BVN were engaged in the retention and refurbishment of the building. Although heritage consultants had recommended to the NSW government that the building contributed to a significant era in Australian architecture, it had refused to list it as heritage-protected. Unfortunately in the controversy surrounding listing, threats of building demolition, and future development into luxury property, there are some who have criticised that activism, such as Save Our Sirius, focused too much on the building, rather than on the residents that were removed from the building and surrounding area. This view is both simplistic and sanctimonious. While a shallow fetishisation of the Sirius building towards an end goal of protection does seem to disregard social issues, the project of saving a building achieves more than architectural legacy as it focuses cultural discussion on a commonly experienced object, and help highlight how value and cost have become estranged in our time of neo-liberal capitalism. While there is definite criticism in the lack of architectural action in other spaces of low-income removal when no “architectural masterpieces” exist, such as Waterloo in Sydney, the campaign to save the Sirius is not reducible to a plight of material object versus human subject.

    Value of nothing

    In Lady Windermere’s Fan Oscar Wilde portrayed the cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. At the end of 2016, Jack Mundey stated the same in response to the New South Wales government’s decision to sell Sirius, and it’s surrounding land. Mundey directed Wilde’s quote towards NSW Environment and Heritage Minister Mark Speakman, who publicly announced the gain of 70 million dollars in resale value from denying heritage listing. At this moment the Sirius sat at the nexus of two systems of thought, one of a possibility of public space funded and shared by all people, and the other as space as a site of individual economic choice in funding and use. The Sirius emerged at a time when public housing formed part of a broader idea of architecture that served community interests and based access on citizenship rather economic means. As the Sirius passes over into private development hands the building reflects a change in thinking around the public and how architecture has become politically stripped of its social impact, in particular erasing the Sirius’s role in shaping Sydney’s social and cultural identity.

    Economics beyond capital

    In governance it seems a clear cut decision, Sydney needs social housing, Sirius provided 79 apartments on valuable land. The sale value of the Sirius could provide capital to build many more subsidised and affordable residencies in other locations. Understood within the current NSW government’s political economy, sustainability is hijacked, social housing must individually sustain itself through income generated from social assets. The social must somehow generate capital to justify its existence.

    Nearly all the residents of Sirius have been forcibly moved on to other social housing, away from friends, employment, amenities and familiar surroundings, but the building remains, its architectural fan base too late to save the once close-knit community held within. In a typical belligerent rehashing of previous mistakes, the NSW government threatens to achieve what the city governors tried in the 1960s, that is the demolition of buildings that express the personality of Sydney. This tendency is not without precedent, visitors to Sydney are astounded to learn that structures such as the iconic Queen Victoria Buildingwere once penned for demolition despite their appearance and cultural importance.

    The strict economic lens of this government misses the value in community and culture at a time when Sydney’s urban population need more resilient social structures to deal with gentrification, segregation and inequality, all which propagate perceptions of difference and fear. The mistake the NSW government makes today is to presume that the location of developments must align with the distribution of income, which must correlate with hard work, merit and a resulting contribution to society. This correlation is politically constructed, and far from the case in a city where trading of debt and unethical capital exchanges produce significantly more wealth than firefighters, police officers and nurses combined. Capitalism is unable to value contribution towards a healthy society beyond an ability to generate an economic surplus.

    Digital Legacy

    On the 27th of November 2016, I was lucky enough to be shown around Sirius by its lead architect Tao Goffers. It’s a remarkable building, but not for the obvious reasons. I was not overly impressed by the apartments and was surprised by the lack of natural light in some spaces, but this was not its remit. Sirius is more about its common spaces, its rooftop gardens, its viewing platforms, its double-height conference room (images here). These spaces provide the opportunity to meet, communicate, cultivate common interests and form bonds of community. When left purely to an economic analysis of space and value, these common areas would be the first to disappear to maximise private commodifiable space.

    You may love the look of Sirius or not, but it is essential to understand that the value of the building is not in its purchase cost or land, but absorbed into the context around its design and the ideas realised in material form. The building encapsulates a legacy through its social focus and innovative method of construction. The modular construction and distribution of different sized apartments imagined a possibility of equality and sought to benefit lower incomes citizens who helped support the maintenance of Sydney rather than serving the wealthy. As the building evolves, this is the narrative we must remember.

    At the end of the tour, Tao handed out USB sticks containing a repository of all the information about Sirius collected over the last 36 years. It was an extraordinary and generous gesture and made me realise that the building represents something more substantial than an object in the city, it is an attitude towards creating architecture that produces social benefit rather than serving economic surplus. Although the building will continue with a luxury facelift the ideas embedded in its construction and organisation need to live on in digital form to express what was previously possible and convey what values we should fight to retain in future, all the information is downloadable here.

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  • Generative Inspiration

    Generative Inspiration

    The architecture design studio I coordinate starts the semester with a generative drawing exercise. The first design brief requires students to produce random lines using bamboo skewers or other stick-like materials. The forced process aims to promote quick drawings that ignore composition decisions and allows students to make visual judgements in finding and documenting patterns. These patterns inspire form-making with no reference to interior habitation requirements or external influences; these come later. The only connection to architecture is that these patterns must result in a habitable poche wall.

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    Innocent By Design – Pinterest – Concept Sketch

    Randomeness

    The act of releasing and then drawing skewers introduces randomness into the design process. Unlike art or music disciplines, architects are often conflicted regarding randomness as it removes design agency. While this is true, randomness in architecture offers little meaning, it does stimulate creativity, break conventional thinking and can suggest unconsidered outcomes.

    Although the random line process ends in a drawing, it takes students a long time to release and trace lines into a starting composition. I am always interested in how the students follow the rules when teaching this beginning project;  they act procedurally to get to a final drawing. The students don’t realise it, but they are making the way a computer program operates. As students plot and join points into lines, they follow a repeatable function that a computer would easily and rapidly complete.

    Hand drawn random lines – Morpholio Trace

    With this in mind, I abstracted the process into a repeatable recipe for the computer, an algorithm capable of producing different digitally generated patterns. The aim became to explore customised software that produces spatial inspiration.

    Generative Design

    As Benedict Gross et al argue in Generative Design, producing customised software changes a designer’s analogue performance to “orchestrating the decision-making process of the computer” (Gross et al, 2, p4). Rather than producing one drawing, if the designer abstracts a process into rules and runs these with different inputs, it will result in multiple images. Abstracting and decomposing problems into smaller chunks through computer language engages the computer’s talent for repetition, randomness and logic and produces outcomes that any analogue process would require obsessive dedication.

    An initial test was how software could produce random lines across a canvas, similar to the bamboo design exercise. Although the outcome was similar, several opportunities arose. One was that the sketch could become interactive, allowing a user to adjust variables and for their inspiration. Another was that the sketch could output an open file format, such as an svg on png, suitable for future design work. The final idea was that the tool could take on the next stage of the design tutorial process, where students generate figure-ground poche diagrams from the generated line patterns.

    The code generated sketch using HTML canvas.

    The sketch regenerates each time the browser refreshes. The next stage is to explore adjustment interaction through a control panel, using a p5.js plugin and an integrated button to export an svg file for inkscape.

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  • Exporting generative lines

    Exporting generative lines

    In a previous post, I wrote about making drawings by tracing over generated line patterns to stimulate the student design process. At the time, I identified a problem with getting the generated patterns out of the computer, alongside being able to create different patterns.

    Since then, I played around with adding a simple interface that allows someone to determine the number of lines, generate a random pattern using a button, and export it as a png for a drawing background.

    The next step is to layer more information into the line generator. I am interested in generating figure-ground patterns or playing around with grid arrangements as a catalyst for new ideas.

    Example

    Choose the number of lines, and push the Draw Lines button to see it in action.

  • Reading Before Prompting

    Reading Before Prompting

    Step aside Virtual Reality and Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence is now the king of hype. As ever, Neil Leach provides a thought provoking lecture in which he summarises AI in Architecture; all through the Digital Learning Futures You Tube page.

    On the back of my PhD thesis about Architecture and data, I’m currently fighting the Instagram FOMO and urge to become part of a new wave of “prompt engineers” using General Adversarial Network (GANS) diffusion tools such as Midjourny, DALL-E or Dream Studio. While the prompt tools are a lot of fun, it remains to be seen if these tools will result in new types of real world material forms, as opposed to speculative pixel based images. Before I join the prompt hype I’m aiming to read the literature mentioned in Leach’s lecture. I have included a list below to whet your appetite.

    Ai in Architecture and Design

    Bernstein, P. (2022). Machine Learning: Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. United Kingdom: RIBA Publishing.

    Carta, S. (2022). Machine Learning and the City: Applications in Architecture and Urban Design. United Kingdom: Wiley.

    Chaillou, S. (2022). Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice. Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

    del Campo, M. (n.d.). Neural Architecture: Design and Artificial Intelligence. United States: Oro Editions.

    Imdat A., Prithwish B., Pratap T. (2022). Artificial Intelligence in Urban Planning and Design: Technologies, Implementation, and Impacts. Netherlands: Elsevier Science.

    Leach, N. (2021). Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.

    Leach, N., del Campo, M.  Eds (2022).Machine Hallucinations: Architecture and Artificial Intelligence. United Kingdom: Wiley.

    Manovich, L. (2018). AI Aesthetics. Russia: Strelka Press.

    AI and Society

    Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

    Harari, Y. N. (2017). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. United States: HarperCollins.

    Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Mitchell, M. (2020). Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. United States: Picador.

    Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited.

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  • Laugier’s Lack of Data

    Laugier’s Lack of Data

    Students explore various characters who shaped culture through writing in my Introduction to Architectural History course. Apart from the big ticket items such as Vitruvius and Alberti, we begin by reading Marc-Antoine Laugier’s “An Essay on Architecture” (Laugier 1753). Laugier’s essay, written in the age of The Enlightenment, argues for architecture’s origin. Consequently, he links the architectural principles of his day to the simplicity and functionality of nature, specifically through the allegory of the Primitive Hut. The writing provides a useful starting point for students as it shows how architectural culture is a contest of published arguments. It is also useful that his perspective can be critiqued for its oversimplification and idealisation of natural forms and primitive constructs, highlighting an ideological bias. In my practice, I find Laugier’s text useful because it emerged from an age of technological transition that provides an interesting parallel with our present-day experience.

    Human Senses

    My research explores architecture culture through data. Having data to analyse is good, but I am more interested in its cultural image, how we measure the world and the consequences. Laugier constructs an origin story for architecture and describes a “primitive man” building a “little rustic hut” who, in the process, invents art by “imitating the natural process” (Laugier, 1753, p11). This story alludes to architecture born from a purely analogue human existence where heightened human senses and practical skills allow survival in nature. For Laugier, architecture emerged from human sensory experience, which enabled “man” to fashion a structure from the environment. The “Primitive Hut”, seen as the prototype of all architecture, represents the outcome of an intuitive data behaviour where all the senses contribute to an improvised outcome. An architecture created in the moment. If I was to join Laugier in making cultural historical claims, the metaphor of the hut portrays a time when architecture reflected a human understanding of the world.

    Lack of Data

    The Enlightenment and the natural sciences discipline that emerged at the time viewed nature through empirical observation. Today, we can appreciate this era as a subjective human analogue experience that resulted in a simplistic worldview. When compared to our contemporary advanced scientific capabilities, we can forgive this simplicity as a lack of data (Carpo, 2017). Humans dealt with this lack by training observation to detect laws that could explain nature, which consequently appeared to be well organised and ideal. This approach contributed to a cultural view of nature as inherently simple and logical, which Laugier embraced in his architectural theory. However, with access to a greater range of measurements, our present-day ecological and biological sciences reveal that nature is a dynamic, interdependent system marked by complex processes rather than simple causal relationships. Humans can only observe what is humanly observable. Sanford Kwinter captures this data deficit in his book Far From Equilibrium (2007), highlighting the defective nature of human senses; that part of the world always remains hidden from us. The Enlightenment radically changed culture through empirical science, but it was based on a lack of data, leading to a worldview we still struggle to let go of.

    Anthropocentric View

    Through Laugier, we can appreciate an attempt to lay the foundation of architecture, but we can see it as promoting an anthropocentric worldview. Back then, the architecture of modernity aligned with the period’s nascent scientific methods and the limited scope of empirical data available at the time. Laws of nature conveniently plugged gaps in understanding to promote humans as special and unique. Today, we are much more aware of our connection to nature and the world’s knowns and unknowns. Today’s paradigm views us within a chaotic, non-linear, multifaceted ecological system. Marc-Antoine Laugier’s book discusses how architecture should be simple and inspired by nature, much like the basic shelters made by early humans. His ideas offer a good starting point for thinking about structures, but it myopically prioritised human survival and culture over everything else. You could argue that the architecture of the Enlightenment consequently produced human-focussed architecture through ornament, sympathetic scale and perspective. However, it also introduced a story of environmental exploitation that we conveniently still hold on to. Despite this limitation, reading Laugier’s argument is still valuable; it reminds us that architecture should be practical, human-scale, and connected to nature, but it must also benefit the environment and promote human survival.

    Carpo, M. (2017). The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Kwinter, S. (2007). Far from Equilibrium : Essays on Technology and Design Culture. Spain: Actar-D.

    Laugier, M.-A. (1753). An Essay on Architecture. Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey & Ingalls. (Original work published 1753)

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  • Decentering the Lecturer

    Decentering the Lecturer

    My experience of university architecture education was that your motivation for success was aligned with pleasing your expert tutor. The desire for praise fueled long days and late nights in the studio. Studio culture promoted a work ethic emphasising producing beautiful artefacts like models and drawings. From my perspective, learning happened through doing, and much of the influences on design came from my library explorations or building visits. This approach to architecture education had one central assumption; that every student learnt through passively absorbing information and then developing a repetitive behaviour of effort and praise.

    End of Lectures

    Architecture education has long been characterised by traditional lecture-style teaching methods, where students passively receive information from their professors. At UTS College, we take a more student-centred approach to teaching architecture. Rather than the teacher acting as the central knowledge repository, the student-centred approach allows students to explore information and establishes active tasks that promote collaborative discovery. The fundamental shift is the teacher transitions from the central expert to a facilitator of student learning.

    What is Student-Centred Teaching?

    Student-centred teaching is an approach to education that places the student at the centre of the learning process. This approach acknowledges that students have unique learning needs, preferences, and goals and learn best when they can control what, when and how they learn. While the student-centred approach could be criticised for ideologically concentrating on individualism, autonomy, and choice over collective ritual, it emphasises academic focus on learning as a process, in contrast to the traditional obsession with outcomes. The argument is that products benefit academic profiles while the process prioritises student learning.

    The shift to student-centred learning potentially clashes with most university architectural faculties for several reasons.

    1. No more lectures: Student-centred teaching encourages students to be active learners rather than passive recipients of presented information.
    2. Personalisation: Student-centred teaching recognises that every student has unique learning preferences and needs. These needs are met through various modes of information engagement, such as videos, readings, presentations and quizzes, allowing students to learn at their own pace.
    3. Engagement: Student-centred teaching keeps students engaged and motivated by actively involving them in learning. Such an approach requires students to teach each other rather than rely on a teacher.

    Some tough decisions.

    The shift from a teacher-centred approach to education will be challenging for some academics who traditionally rely on lectures as their primary teaching method. I think there is a place for lectures in architectural education. Still, academics willing to embrace a de-centring from student learning must introduce more interactive and engaging activities into their lectures, using multimedia resources and tools and leveraging digital technologies to enhance the learning experience.

    Education is changing, and architectural academics must play a key role in designing and developing new teaching methods and approaches that suit the discipline’s unique knowledge and skills while better aligning with the needs and expectations of today’s students. While there is a debate about whether education should adapt to diminishing social media-induced attention spans or train students to achieve deeper focus, architecture academics must help shape the future of education and contribute to the ongoing evolution of the field.

    Ultimately, the key to academic success in a changing educational landscape is flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace new ideas and approaches. By staying up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in education and actively seeking opportunities for growth and innovation, academics can thrive as educators and mentors if they are willing to de-centre themselves.

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  • How Arch Manu Addresses Critical Challenges for a Sustainable Future

    Critical Challenges for a Sustainable Future

    Transforming the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry to meet our global sustainability targets is not just important, it is essential. The built environment—the structures, infrastructure, and facilities that define our daily existence—accounts for a significant share of global resource consumption and carbon emissions. In Australia, as in many parts of the world, the challenge lies in addressing climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. Despite the immense challenges and widespread recognition of the need for change, the industry remains fragmented, with no clear consensus on the best path forward, risking failure to meet its sustainability goals.

    Goals

    The AEC industry has set ambitious sustainability goals: achieving net-zero carbon emissions, improving energy efficiency, utilising sustainable materials, conserving water, reducing waste, protecting biodiversity, constructing climate-resilient infrastructure, and promoting social sustainability. The timeline is tight, with significant progress targeted by 2030 and net-zero by 2050. However, a critical barrier to achieving these goals is the profound skills gap, particularly in advanced computational techniques, digital fabrication, and data management. These are the very skills that could revolutionise how we design and construct, making processes more efficient, less wasteful, and more sustainable.

    Digital Integration

    There is broad consensus within the industry that digital integration of design and manufacturing processes is essential to achieving these goals. This integration is crucial for reducing the environmental impact of construction. However, a significant hurdle remains: converting architectural designs into machine-readable formats for direct use in manufacturing. The industry has yet to fully embrace the tools and techniques that could make this a reality.

    Techno-Social Systems

    Collaboration between human expertise and advanced technology will be a linchpin in achieving these goals. AEC professionals are adept at designing and executing complex projects, but they are constrained by the limits of human cognition and perception when managing highly intricate tasks, such as producing precise constructions at scale or detecting patterns in massive data sets. Emerging tools, like Neural Networks, can augment human abilities, allowing us to address these complexities more effectively. Yet, the expertise required to fully leverage these technologies is still in its infancy. Without developing these skills, the industry may miss critical opportunities to make more informed and sustainable decisions. The need for comprehensive education in architectural computing is urgent. Without a workforce proficient in the latest digital technologies, the industry will struggle to keep pace with the demands of digital transformation and sustainability.

    Circular Design

    Sustainable design is another area where consensus on its importance is universal, yet the integration of digital tools to enhance sustainability remains insufficient. Every building must be part of a circular economy to ensure we introduce as few new resources as possible into the built environment. However, achieving this level of circularity requires coordination and resource management beyond human capabilities; it demands digital tools that can identify, link, and track resource availability in real time.

    Sustainable Future

    Arch Manu is stepping into this complex landscape with a clear mission: to confront these challenges head-on. By providing cutting-edge training in digital skills, fostering deeper integration between design and manufacturing, and pioneering new approaches to data management, we aim to lead the AEC industry towards a more sustainable future. The centre is also exploring innovative business models and sustainable design practices, ensuring that the next generation of AEC professionals is well-equipped to tackle the industry’s most pressing challenges.

    The road ahead for the AEC industry is undoubtedly challenging. However, with the right skills, tools, and strategies in place, there is a clear path to a more sustainable, efficient, and resilient built environment. Arch Manu is committed to leading the way, ensuring that the industry not only meets its sustainability targets but thrives in the process.

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  • Digital Fabrications

    Digital Fabrications

    Galo Canizares is a rare practitioner; he is an assistant professor of architecture but is an advanced digital technology user with projects that explore the edges of the web and data. He is right up my Straße. His work helps me position my practice, as he is somewhat of an outlier. Take his book “Digital Fabrications” for instance, a book of stories describing experiments with digital tools, is a little confusing. If you knew Galo was an architect and you read the title, you would presume there would be examples of structures and physical objects scattered through the pages, but this is not the case. Digital Fabrication is about the digital image, and fabrications relate to fabricating reality more than it does to the fabric of reality.

    Interface

    I often find myself exploring ideas outside architecture, getting lost down the rabbit holes of technology’s cultural influence. Galo Canizares is the same; he is architecturally trained but has successfully expanded his practice to investigate and experiment with the digital, particularly the effects of digital interfaces on design. Today, he argues, software is ubiquitous and influences culture through the information we produce, consume and share through technical interfaces. Digital Fabrications highlights how Architects often use a variety of software packages and applications without thinking critically about how these tools have changed their work.

    Contexts

    The book unfolds like a fun journey through unrelated explorations, first setting the stage with the political influence of software and interfaces, then taking an exciting detour to narrate the history of Earth from a Martian perspective. This shift to science fiction is inventive and a surprising twist, but it veers away from the book’s expected theme, digital interfaces and dilutes the overall message.

    Experiments

    The projects featured in this book are technically impressive. Canizares develops an “absurdly dumb Twitter bot that would potentially say smart things” (p129), incorporating an artificial architecture culture personality into the design. The web drawing app Malevi.ch interprets the twentieth-century ‘Suprematist’ artist Kazimir Malevich’s theory of irrational space into an interactive interface. The written explanation is interesting, but the outcome of a force-directed figure-ground pattern generator doesn’t quite match the justification. It prompts one to question whether the tool was actually an experiment with matter.js and post-rationalised as a critical analysis of Malevich’s work.

    The Malevi.ch app by Galo and Jose Canizares

    Discussion

    Canizares’s digital interface experiments are noteworthy, but his two essays titled ‘Everything is Software’ are the real standouts. These pieces connect digital media theory with architectural discourse, defining two key terms: ‘postdigital’ and ‘postorthographic’. The ‘Post-Digital’ concept is exemplified by Carlo Listroti, who uses digital technology to craft architectural drawings that outstrip human precision and speed. In contrast, the ‘Postorthographic’ concept aligns with the work of Casey Reas, who uses pixels to generate images from data. ‘Post-orthographic’ signifies a shift from traditional 3D to 2D drawing techniques — like plans, elevations, and sections — to creating images based on pixels. Canizares argues that this ‘postorthographic’ approach ushers in a new form of dominant visual communication through social media, which in turn significantly impacts our social behaviours and collective cultural history.

    So What?

    I enjoyed reading the book, however, my critique would be that, at times, I found it difficult to follow the central point. A greater hierarchy of ideas through headings would have been beneficial, but I can understand the author’s choice as this would steer the writing into a more academic tone. I appreciate how the book links the past to the future through digital media, but I was left pondering, so what do we do? Canizares does well to convince the reader that interfaces and interaction are the future political spheres of influence but treats them as foregone conclusions and inevitable. This gap stimulates an alternative and critical response where designers reappropriate or hack interfaces to counteract the political influence gained from interaction.

    Canizares, G. (2019). Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-based Planet. United States: ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design.

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  • Mixed Feelings About Reality

    The Luddites would have loved mixed reality.

    Mixed Feelings About Reality

    In the previous post, I wrote about the potential benefits of using mixed reality in architectural design and fabrication. The combination of Hololens, software communication protocols (such as Fololens) and design software (such as Rhino 3D) produce a cyber-human-material system that combines the tactile experience and physical feedback of human material experience with computational mathematical calculation. Previously I highlighted the capacity for mixed reality systems to embed knowledge from extensive craft practice experience into the interactive system resulting in a break in the relationship between skill and complexity of material manipulation. On the one hand, this potentially increases the quality of everyday objects, but on the other, it reduces the cultural value placed on those whose knowledge is bound within their mental and physical memory.

    If a future scenario occurs where complex structures are achievable without any practice or experience two trajectories seem very likely when set in a historical context. It is not hard to make a connection between the ability of the Hololens to the impact of manufacturing machines in the industrial revolution, both make material objects easier to produce. While I’m not saying mixed reality will have the same scale impact of industrial production, it is worth considering the effect of a system of architectural production that is driven by a desire to absorb expertise and externalise information via virtual projections.

    Virtual Luddites

    The Arts and Crafts movement, related to the machine sabotaging Luddites, viewed mechanical production as a threat to the artist’s freedom, their creative produce and their livelihood. While with hindsight it is easy to argue that art survived and found new mediums and subject matters through which to question the world, it is true the machine eroded the role of the artist in the production of cultural objects. The most significant loss from machinic repetitive production and specialisation was the shift in cultural importance on the learning of a skill. It is an unknown how cultural value would shift with increased use of mixed reality. The rise of the internet and improved access to digital fabrication was thought to sound the death knell for craft skills, but paradoxically they have become popular counter practices to the overtly robotic processes of making. However, there is a potential shift where most people can work with materials without really knowing them, or emotionally engaging with them over a long period. If there is no need to learn the behaviour of a substance through extensive creative practice, then a source of stimulation and expression is lost from human existence.

    Exploitation of the machine

    The other trajectory involves the use of humans akin to automated assets. When the industrial revolution introduced efficiencies in making and material use, it also brought a cultural shift in human management. The initial Taylorist project of economic management of human energy, hoped to liberate workers from the machine through greater leisure time, ultimately tied them back to the machines through new types of employment structures and exploitative practices. If a headset allows multiple unskilled people to make high-quality material construction, it is not hard to see the wages reduce in tandem with the skills required to participate. The intelligence is bound up within the digital system meaning that those who own, setup and manage the system exist in a central position of power, those who don a mixed reality headset potentially become a directable organic agent, one of many indistinguishable faces masked by the tinted headset screen. The outcome could be a mechanical Turk like system for construction, please never advocate for an “uber” for architecture.

    In a familiar Marxist scenario, those with the knowledge and means of production (Hololens technology) hold a position of economic power and capacity to absorb capital from material (the construction) and immaterial (the data) assets. The above may seem far-fetched, but it is critical to think about how emerging technology is employed in exploitative as well as liberating endeavours. The question to ask in developments with mixed reality is whether there is an imbalance in benefit between the human subject and material object. A more balanced scenario could be the use of technology to develop craft abilities or uses that engage the body with making but allows and encourages mistakes to benefit the mastery of the human subject rather than the material object. Not everyone has the ability and time to be a craftsperson, but the experience gained is a highly subjective experience and remains with the body for life. For a culture that no longer values craft it will once again become the domain of the wealthy and privileged.

    It is essential to cast a critical eye on technological development and understand how systems that benefit architecture can have a negative impact beyond the experience of the material object, however for the meantime I will be experimenting with Fologram some more, I just now need to beg, steal or borrow a $7000 Hololens.

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