SIZE MATTERS.
As the craft of designing and building big, durable things, architecture has always been about tectonics. The core tectonic issues cannot be extrapolated from a scaled model, or a 3D digital construct. Scaled models oversimplify production sequences and abridge material properties; digital models, even those equipped with structural analysis intelligence, remain incorporeal and abstract. The intersections of design and engineering require uniquely physical resolutions.
The great majority of building materials and products are anisotropic. The countless spatial permutations among them bottleneck into a smaller set of rules for their aggregation. Historically, the transition from raw materiality into a finished object or assembly is where artistic values come in sharp focus and professional competence stands out.
The major consequence of building at full scale is that the product size and weight expands beyond a single person’s physical ability to handle. The object becomes “dangerous”, a need for team management emerges. That promotes a particular kind of visceral tectonic discipline familiar to people inhabiting machine shops and sculptors’ studios, the architectural take on “ideas having consequences”. Small scale digitally fabricated models have been criticized for lacking tectonic rationale, and “building big” offers a remedy. It focuses uncompromisingly on unitization, connections, interfaces and the joints of singular and fluid components.
FESTINA LENTE
Small scale digital fabrication, in contrast to traditional methods of physical modeling, has an immediacy of production which can be misleading. To engage it without a clear understanding of the professional logistics is to sidestep practice related acumen inherent to the architectural profession. Such an abridged process often diminishes the organizational richness of the work.
One of the consequences of the digital revolution in design is the disregard for scale. In digital modeling, zooming into details, and zooming out to assess the whole, is a seamless operation, where speed and ease are unprecedented in the traditional craft of architectural design. The result is a sense of total visual control within the virtual design realm, which leads to a false sense of empowerment when applied to physical construction. Making at full-scale the digitally created assemblies cures this fallacy. The staggering formal variety achieved through digital modeling lends itself to prototyping with an ease that is inconsistent with the objects’ geometrical complexity. The full-scale prototype inserts metrics of plausibility (the correlation of cost, finish detailing, means and methods of construction, etc.) within the set of iterative solutions. It’s goal transcends visual evaluation and fine tuning and becomes an actual design and engineering vehicle.
IN PRACTICE
Within the carefully managed system of construction economics it is often difficult to justify operations which lack a clear cut relationship to the bottom line. The engineering and construction logistics professionals partnering with the architect in the construction process in general prefer to stick to a narrower, more linear path to the production deadline. A full-scale prototype is the epitome of a non-linear process, as it is fundamentally a problem statement. Full-scale fabrication will become commonplace when it establishes credibility beyond the architectural studios, when engineers and construction managers start to regard it as the inevitable tool for resolving important engineering and detailing problems.
IN CONCLUSION
The future of architecture is irrevocably connected to digital design. The future of construction builds upon the culture of technological innovation that has been on an upswing in the last couple of decades. Fabrication at full scale is the essential, live link between these two correlated procedural systems. It helps expand the field of vision of architects and builders into each other’s realm, beyond the existing, time tested solutions, and facilitate the evolution of the profession and its continued relevance.