I attended a meeting with Biomime, organized by Mats Brodén, who is attampting to extablish a new collaborative forum between the material researchers at Biomime (working with new materials at molacular level, as well as gene manipulation). Mats has also been important to the development of the brief for AA DIP16, and he is in parallel pushing for the development of a research center in Simrishamn (with a strong environmental link – the Baltic Sea – as well as use of new materials and processes in the design and production of the facilities.
I think the relation to Biomime is interesting especially in long term, the materials they develop are far from being available on the market but set certain goals in how architects can look at both design and production issues. Students at both KTH-A and the AA will be pushing these issues in their projects, and my personal role is at this point to be the discussion. Obviously I am also looking at potential connections to my research.
Dip16 visiting Robert Aish seminar in Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Robert Aish
Dip16 is examining current tendencies in spatial production dictated by developments in material science, digital manufacturing, processes of industrial production and economics as well as new organizational models and methods of procurement. This is directly aimed at deploying architecture as a customized consumer object as the premise for the production and realization of a frivolous space arising from a new environmentally conscious ecology of construction.
We will question the building industry’s short sighted view of the balance between quality, longevity, economy and environmental impact and investigate alternate economical systems in order to found an agile and adaptive framework for a an innovative and sustainable architecture exploiting key concepts such as parametric design, digital fabrication, localized production and ultimately mass customization.
The act of building is our planet’s largest polluting agent. In our view innovation in technology, material science, fabrication techniques and production methods is offering the only novel way of producing space capable of reducing waste, the carbon footprint and our dependency on fossil fuels without having to entirely rely on reductive models of optimization and performance. Dip16 will be researching this new ecology of industrialized building and looking for new solutions based on industrialized production deploying processes and procurement routes provided by NGOs and Open Source communities.
We are searching for an architecture of composites in which spatial quality, material performance, the design of fabrication processes as well as production processes are balanced means in the production of a highly site and context specific architecture with an inherit capacity for redeployment and re-adaptation.
Dip 16 will revisit traditional building concepts such as blocks, slabs, post and beams, shells, frames, tents and fibres as well as ecologies of fabrication and production through history. In the search for composite conditions we will investigate basic building taxonomy through means of fabrication such as milling, folding, laminating, sewing, stacking, interlocking, hanging, injection moulding, compositing, extrusion, weaving, bundling etc. Spatially and programmatically this will entail various degrees of articulation from the standardized low tech component to the highly articulated formal element, avoiding self similar repetition in favour for the diversity of the composite.
We will spring from the past years’ open exploration of parametric and computational techniques in the search for a more contextual and integrated mode of design, in which the rationality sought for in the industry, can meet formal, analytical and procedural experimentation across a range of seamlessly integrated scales managed via a building information model (BIM).
