tools + process + materials = making

"In 1990, in a lecture at the American Academy in Rome, the historian Joseph

Connors argued that it was not a history of painting or sculpture that enabled

the novel spiral form of Borromini’s S Ivo alla Sapienza (1643) to be imagined

and constructed, but rather the invention of a tool, the wood lathe. This

comment got our attention. How do tools (now more elaborately defined as

emerging technologies or techniques) drive our architecture? Tools shape

materials that make forms, not the other way around.

Tools are inclusive: for us the handcrafted and the digitally

controlled are equally legitimate. We have a visceral distrust of the digital as

a means of producing images or pictures yet we use it physically and directly

for making architecture. It is a revolution of choice. We believe the most

compelling shifts in design occur when new technologies and fabrication

capabilities are made available and interpreted in new ways. In our work, this

impulse coincides with a strong discipline for making, guided by the belief that

ideas emerge from the drawn line or fashioned artefact, rather than it being a

case of the representation illustrating an idea after the fact.

As unit masters at the AA in the mid-90s we asked our students to

propose an architectural prototype that emerged from the control of a technical

system. We wanted them to consider how you make architecture from specific

tools. Rejecting the rampant formalism produced by computer software (then

as now), we used laser machine-tools to cut, bend and punch sheet-metal to

produce an architectural prototype. The result was a reversal of the normative

design process: the starting point is a material, which leads to a detail, which

leads to a prototype, which leads to programme and siting."

from Barkow Leibinger: Atlas Of Fabrication Intro

Goto: Work: Applied Research: Choose a Topic

I really like this intro that Bryant shared with me from a book by Barkow Leibinger architects. I think this philosophy is extremely pertinent to our time. Tools, process, and material; it doesn't get any more simple. Making the tangible artifact is necessary to make something of significance or to learning anything of substance. 

"This course locates itself in the act of making, and seeks to answer specific questions about specific acts of production in design and fabrication, to determine their role in conceptualizing art and architecture. A central postulate of this semester is that the “making” of artifacts clarifies intentions and invigorates the design process."  

from Flood/Snyder Fabrication Methodologies Syllabus 2009