The Production of Architecture (or is architecture getting easier?)

The recent preoccupation with bespoke automated production processes, like 3D printing and other forms of CADCAM could lead to the conclusion that Architecture is getting easier.  For sure, it is easier than ever to produce a model of just about any form that can be imagined.  Brick-laying machines make no differentiation between a flat wall and the three-way curving brick forms that pushed the craft of bricklaying during the 'Amsterdam School' period of the early 20th Century, for example.

Wall, A. Robot

In Architecture school, model-making is a key pedagogical tool, but 3D printing is becoming so fast and cheap, it is a fair question as to why we still bother making models by hand. Working with a material, finding its limitations and responding (either by changing material, or adjusting the spatial idea) pushes an individual interest in spatial forms where the process of production is inherent in the architectural form.  This results in engaged Architecture: that which has a conversation with the world.  Its not to say that unconstrained form-making doesn't have a role in this; it does, but always as part of a wider conversation, otherwise its merely rhetorical.

Plaster cast of the ceiling of a Boromini church by UEL Diploma student.  More here

I recently started learning Rhino after having spent a lot of time struggling with 3D studio, AutoCAD and even Sketchup, which I find perversely difficult to use.  Rhino is like a breath of fresh air: its so easy and quick, one wonders why other software even exists.  Literally anything seems possible and when it becomes as easy to draw a non-uniform curve as a straight line, the choice between the two becomes a decision; there is no longer a default (and I haven't even started with Grasshopper yet).  Nonetheless, a line still represents something: normally a material set in space toward a given function (which may be purely architectural).  The conversation between these two positions is what makes new capabilities exciting.  What leaves me cold is when one drives the other.  To pick an obvious example, Zaha's buildings tend to incorporate furniture also designed by her, because ordinary furniture is the wrong shape (or is it the building?).  Its clear when you step into (at least some) of her buildings, that they inhabit another world and this is the vision that many enjoy in her work.  For me, it lacks tolerance though and it feels like an architecture of disengagement. Zaha is surely enjoying these new capabilities and for her, architecture does seem to be getting easier.

Back in the studio, though our students are developing extraordinary conversations between new and traditional capabilities and techniques.  Diploma Unit 6, run by Isaie and Gilles are exploring the interactions between different systems of production: 3D printing, plaster casting, sculpting and layering; Degree Unit C (Klara and Satoshi) are using 3D routers to develop brick moulds for traditional casting that explore these new capabilities at the component scale; Diploma Unit 11 (Jamie and Colin) are using traditional plaster casting to understand the form and articulation of Lutyens' buildings in a way that still can't be achieved with a 3D printer.  In all of these, the uncertainty of outcome is key to the process: the process learns from its product and vice versa.

Degree Unit C

Diploma Unit 6

Diploma Unit 11

All this takes us back to the likes of Karl Marx, William Morris, Henri Lefebvre: we cannot escape our social relationship with the making of our environment.  New capabilities are both a blessing and a curse: they allow new modes of production, but also offer tempting refuges from the real world.  Architecture can absolutely transcend function, materiality, time and place, but it only serves a polemic purpose when it engages with these fundamentals in conversation; ignoring them is just pointless, or purposeless.  A more interesting avenue for me is the potential for these capabilities to allow a more dispersed production of architecture: a 21st Century self-build.  That somehow seems more radical and engaged with the contemporary social context.

Greg Henderson said cycle racing is like fighting a gorilla: you don't stop when you get tired, you stop when the gorilla gets tired.  Architecture is the same: it shouldn't get easier, you can just go further. Fight that gorilla...