Disrupting the Digital: An Architecture of Parts

The paper ascribes to a belief that architecture should be wholly digital – from the scale of the micron and particle to the brick, beam and building, from design to fabrication or construction. This embodies a fundamental and disruptive shift in architecture and design thinking that is unique to the project images included, enabling design to become more inclusive, participatory and open-source. Architecture that is wholly digital requires a radical rethinking of existing design and building practices. Thes projects described in this paper each develops a set of parts in relationship to a specific digital fabrication technology. These parts are defined as open-ended, universal and versatile building blocks, with a digital logic of connectivity. Each physical part has a malefemale connection which is the equivalent of the 0 and 1 in digital data. The design possibilities – or the way that parts can combine and aggregate – can be defined by the geometry and therefore, design agency, of the piece itself. This discrete method advances a theoretical argument about the nature of digital design as needing to be fundamentally discrete, and at the same time responding to ideas coming from open-source, distributed modes methods of production. Furthermore it responds to today’s housing crisis, providing for a more democratic and equitable framework for the production of housing. To think of architecture as wholly digital is to substantially disrupt the way that we think about design, authorship, ownership and process, as well as the building technologies and practices we use in contemporary architectural production.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.16

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0