Digital design and robotic fabrication technologies are rapidly maturing towards mainstream architectural application. To participate in this structurally performative, material-saving and aesthetic revolution architects and designers need to incorporate, among other parameters, fabrication related expressive opportunities and constraints into the early design stage. This maturing paradigm of fabrication-aware creation of shape – so called Architectural Geometry has a symbiotic relation with the design-research trajectory of Tectonism which stylistically expresses the inherent structural and manufacturing logics of the shape.

Architectural geometry and Tectonism simultaneously incorporate traditional wisdoms and historic practises methods of design and construction, particularly those related to masonry and timber construction and state-of-the-art methods of Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Geometric Design. This contrasts with the currently widespread paradigm of history and process-agnostic creation of shape. This subsequently leads to materially wasteful designs, and time and resource-expensive, post-processing of such shapes to modify the shapes to suit manufacturing requirements.

This workshop will provide a gentle, hands-on introduction to geometry topics of stereotomy, ruled surfaces and their computational adaptation. The workshop will also incorporate technological topics of robotic fabrication and web-services including remote accessing and instructing an industrial robot set-up to cut foam.

Approx. 1 hour lecture each day, 4 hours total.

Approx. 2-hour tutorials each day, 8 hours total

Approx. 30-minute robot time per student (access times will be outside of workshop time)

2-hour first review of student work

2-hour of final review of student work