Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT talks about his new project 'Fab Labs' at the TED conference. Fab Labs is a program to set up fabrication laboratories in remote areas, giving the community a way to make the things they imagine. It's basically a program to empower designers all over the world.
In the lecture he argues that fabrication is going through a similar period of invention the way that computers did in the 60's. Computer research really took off when the size got small enough to be able to be used by small work groups of five to ten people. Although still clumsy and gigantic by modern standards Gershenfeld argues that this decentralized invention model allowed for computers to really advance. No longer did invention need to come from a big corporation with a massive R&D budget. The Fab labs work in similar ways by bringing current digital fabrication equipment such as water jet machines, laser cutters and 3d printers to the people. It's safe to assume that for Gershenfeld every future household will have fabricating tools the same way they currently have the personal computer.
Architects being at the front of such a push should incorporate such tools into their workflow. This forces designers to think of fabrication immediately working at full scale and themselves becoming an integral part of the construction process.
Undoubtedly there is group in academia that pushes in this direction but there is also a large number of architects that are designing completely divorced from fabrication and construction processes. This is not limited to wild digital designs, even offices that are involved in building fairly conventional buildings often limit their influence to organization and aesthetics. As Timberlake writes in 'refabricating architecture' the success of mass production over the last century has pushed architects from being designers of buildings into the selector of products. In such a model architects are acting like savvy consumers, picking certain products over others because of their performance, looks, or price. This divorce isn't limited to the high tech products, even simple construction systems such as partition wall or mechanical systems are left to the contractor to decide on site. Architects will say such systems are standard and a waste of time to address. But by failing to address such systems architects only have control of superficial surface treatments. Formal geometry no longer is a result of construction processes and many times goes against it. Neil Denari's smooth planes are one case in point, their typical drywall-stick member construction are completely defied and hidden to produce the final effect.
Buildings should be smartly designed and well constructed. The quality of the product should matter to the architect.
Owner/Builder
This is the conventional player diagram from AD Mar 2004
The general trend of recent technology has been to empower the user. Using the internet and software as tools for research and computation we are able to accomplish things that were beyond our capacity. Sketchup is a great example of this. Now, for free, anyone is able to download an intuitive 3d software program and design buildings. They can then take their buildings and put them into google earth to see how they appear on site. The visualization tools that were once only available to architects are now being used by everyone. This leads me to question if the current services offered by the architect are what clients want or need. Although an isolated incident, still funny to read, here a story of a client that didn't want to pay for a design because it was done in sketchup. This little incident shows that even if the architect is talented, if the public see our services as being a unnecessary then they won't be willing to pay.
I think public interest in design is a good thing for architects but it also means that architects have to change from providing design to become someone that helps people find what it is they want. This suggests a closer working relationship between the client and the architect in which the architect plays the role of a consultant. Here a report about a contracting company called Ubuildit. In this case the contractor provides the information necessary to allow the home owner to build their own dream home. I think a similar model can be applied to architecture in which
the owner works as the general contractor with the architect helping them realize what they want to build along the way. This allows for more flexibility in design because it is the owner who takes responsibility for the project, possibly hiring the architect under him as an employee. In this case what the architect provides are drawings and some custom prefab parts that work with the system that the architect has set up. The larger gestural design moves and spatial planning moves are done by the client. This makes the idea of code design more important in that the signature of the architect is not in the gestural move but instead embedded in the every detail of the building, influencing it in subtle ways.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)