July 22, 2015
Refabricating the Elements
Lab Testing Planar Structure Software Lawrence Sass & Ines Ariza Massachusetts Institute of Technology UROPs Elisabeth Boles, June Kim, Calvin ZhongIntroduction
Last summer at the 2014 Venice Biennale Rem Koolhaas called on architects to address new questions related to the design the of building elements opposed to the overall building form. He challenged designers to rethink how the elements–the pieces, parts and of building structures, should be designed and function. In his published volume entitled “Elements”, Koolhaas illustrates and discusses our common understanding of building elements such as doors, windows, staircases, elevators, ramps, etc, with the hope to inspire a deeper investigation of their meaning, performance and use. This summer we will redesign and prototype building components using a demonstration tool entitled “Lu Ban”; software system aimed at delivery of large objects from CAD/CAM machines. The goal is to address questions related to component forming, materials processing and function as it relates to digital methods of production. The expectation for this summer is to generate a broad collection of study models from the software leading to the construction of new knowledge as it relates to design and digital fabrication.
Human Interaction Converted to Rules
The core of our work will be a relationship of human interaction, computation and digital fabrication. Human interaction or cognition is the core of which is related to making. In other words, we want to know that human factors we should consider when building the system (software) either explicit modeling or generative modeling (Lu Ban). We will focus the summer on learning about Human interaction with modeled artifacts through desktop models of archtiectural elements.
