Early this year, I got chance to visit The University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. And I was luckily able to check out its impressive fabrication lab. It was inspiring talking with prof. Karl Daubmann, prof. Glenn Wilcox and director of the FAB lab Wesley McGee. I appreciated it a lot that they showed me some of their creative works.
The short visit also gave me quite a lot to think about. Certainly, there is much potential for applying digital fabrication in architecture design and production processes. Digital fabrication is the process of translating a digital design into a physical object. Its techniques such as rapid prototyping, stereolithography and laser cutting enable the production of physical objects directly from digital models. It allows creating new forms or structures, and exploration of the aesthetics of space.
But I am thinking about the possibility of mapping invisible data, not just concrete/hard data such as body movement, breath, and temperature but also some more abstract/soft information - for instance, memory, emotions, cognitive processes, thoughts, etc. into the architectural space generated by digital fabrication technology. And when these data could be embedded into our living space, in turn they would affect the way we interact with the environment.
Apart from this, I am always fascinated by how basic geometries with simple algorithms can be aggregated and emerge into extensively complicated forms. I’d like to see more creative or experimental digital fabricated works.
