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Fabricate: Digital Manufacturing in Architecture

By Lara J Carim, on 19 April 2011

Increasing availability of digital manufacturing is causing architects to ask serious questions of their profession. Where lies the craft in a project? Is it better to specialise or to co-ordinate others? And for new graduates, emerging into an uncertain market, is there opportunity to be both digital dreamers and hands-on makers?

These questions – and many more – were debated at Fabricate on 15–16 April reports David Shanks, a final-year student of the Graduate Diploma in Architecture at the UCL Bartlett in Unit 23, who was one of ten students who helped with the conference.

Fabricate truly fulfilled its promise to bring together “pioneers from architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation”. Across two intense days the speakers, whose papers were selected from over 240 submissions, presented their hard-won visions of the future to an international delegation of students, educators and practitioners.

On the eve of the conference an accompanying publication was launched, edited by co-chairs Bob Sheil and Ruairi Glynn (both from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture), to give a flavour of the days ahead. This coincided with an exhibition in the Bartlett School of Architecture where an industrial robot constructed walls without breaking a sweat, and the newly-formed outfit ScanLAB exhibited magical point-cloud scans of last year’s Summer Show.

The four keynote speakers – Mark Burry, Neri Oxman, Matthias Kohler and Philip Beesley – immediately established the credibility of Fabricate and the breadth of its subject matter. Their profile might account for the fact that the conference sold out twice, having to relocate from the Building Centre to UCL to increase capacity, but the variety and calibre of less renowned speakers really gave it character.

If the panel discussions weren’t conclusive, this only served to reflect that much within digital manufacture remains to be explored and tested. Speaker Phil Ayres’ reminder of the GOFO method was timely in this regard – Go Off and Find Out! The answers to our questions will be found through making as much as talking.

View images of Fabricate conference and exhibition on Ruairi Glynn’s Flickr account

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