Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Fabrication and architecture
Yet another data-point on the relationship between fabrication technologies, design, and education. It's weird how you sometimes see clusters of things.
Fabrication: The Fifth Ecology of Los Angeles
For [architect] Jason Payne of gnuform, Los Angeles provided an opportunity, as he says, “to strain through materiality†the more abstract formal experimentation his office had been pursuing in New York....
Los Angeles’s unique culture of fabrication that make it one of the most exciting places to practice in the world today. Drawing on the expertise of fabricators working with Los Angeles-based aerospace, automotive, and entertainment industries, these and other area architects are beginning to materialize designs that until recently were trapped inside their computers. What seems especially appealing is the willingness of Los Angeles fabricators to take on jobs that require extraordinary flexibility in schedule, budget and specifications of final product.
This looseness and embrace of collaboration has fostered a design culture in which fabrication has become an increasingly important engine of design innovation. Architects design by making, by fabricating, which enables them to quickly learn from successes and failures, building the design intelligence required of more refined and robust designs.
I suspect that many of the substantive objections to having computers in the classroom can be boiled down to issues involving bringing a then-disruptive cyberspace into the classroom-- and that we can begin to see how, for some disciplines at least, we could design our way past those problems.