wisp
scott townsend
With the advent of current fabrication technologies and methods of architectural representation, rapid prototyping has evolved into an iterative design process that allows for constant feedback between all aspects of design. Prototyping has also specifically allowed designers to explore tectonic facets through an iterative physical process; a process that hybridizes both the digital and physical realms of representation. These technologies have also pushed designers to question the role of architecture and architects on the cusp of the twentieth-century that concern issues of place, difference and systematics, notation and geometry. The approach taken for the artifact design exercise was one of material systems and haptic exploration; an exploration of design emerging from the act of making. In an era of pervasive digital networking, where does the role of making lie in terms of representation and ground? A question that Malcolm McCulllough also raised, in the electronic age where people have grown accustomed to indirect, ad-hoc interaction mediated through networking, how does one find a grounding for societal activity and culture? The concept of 'digital ground' emerges as a space for design, giving architectural gestures a presence in a pervasive and nomadic, digitized culture. On a parallel note, the artifact exploration also touches upon the notion of discovering architecture as a rhythmic pattern; one that is embedded in every level of matter. Through the work of Reiser and Umemoto, design and discovery through making is also explored in terms of the guncotton analogy provided in their Atlas of Novel Tectonics. The use of an evolving physical diagram; the use of which is used to model, deploy and optimise dynamic, heterogeneous varieties, multi-scalar systems, gradients, fields and forces. The notion of the artifact grew from the idea of a basis; a ground in which to anchor the exploration of other fabrication strategies and material systems. In a sense, the base perhaps became the most prominent, iterative portion of the design. The concept was to achieve a certain fluidity, first explored through the notion of a gravity formwork, in tension through the use of fabric to achieve an organic pour. The base was to serve as a point of departure for the growing diagrammatical network of material explorations.