The Bartlett School of Architecture has the most comprehensive digital fabrication suite dedicated to education and research out of all UK Built Environment Departments and Faculties. The suite includes a £500,000 3D printing and laser sintering facility and advanced 3D digital fabrication machinery for wood, plastic and metal.
The Bartlett is offering places on this cutting edge course for up to 50 qualified applicants. Students will learn how to export handmade models into a digital format, and how to construct digital models for 3D printing or prototyping in nylon, wood and metal.
Students are expected to bring a design proposal to the course that can be used to explore different modes of 3D digital representation and fabrication. The design proposal can be in the form of a physical model, 2D digital drawings or 3D digital representations. Possible design proposals include a building, a fragment of a building, a component, a piece of furniture, a piece of jewellery, a sculpture or a decorative item.
The course lasts for 4 weeks, is full time, where the majority of learning is project based and developed in tutorials. The first 4-week course includes free attendance to the Digital Architecture Conference 2009.
I’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks putting the final touches to the first Digital Architecture London conference and I’m pleased to say that I’ve got everyone I really wanted to speak at the event to agree to join in. If your in London on September 21st, I hope you can make it. Speakers include Patrik Schumacher, Neil Spiller, Brett Steele, Tony Dunne, Geoff Manaugh, Usman Haque, Murray Fraser, Hanif Kara, Rachel Armstrong, Bob Sheil, Charles Walker, Tobi Schneidler, Marcos Cruz, Alvin Huang, Matt Webb, Stephen Gage, Alan Penn, Marjan Colletti and Daniel Bosia. Check out the programme for more details on the speakers http://www.digital-architecture.org/london/programme/. The event is being held as part of London Digital Week which will be occurring alongside the London Design Festival.
Below is the press release.
To celebrate London as a centre of design and innovation, the ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference will take place at the Building Centre on 21st September 2009. Presenting a selection of London’s leading architects, artists, designers and engineers, the conference will examine how London is shaping the digital future of the built environment.
Introducing the latest developments in digital design practice, the conference will explore new spaces, social interactions, design and fabrication processes, and speculate on architecture’s post-digital futures.
Speakers include:
Patrik Schumacher, Director and Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects and Co-Founder, Design Research Laboratory, Architectural Association.
Neil Spiller, author of Digital Architecture Now [2008], Visionary Architecture [2007] and many more; Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory; and Director of AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Brett Steele, Director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture and AA Publications; and Co-founder and former Director of the AADRL.
Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art; and Co-founder of Dunne & Raby.
Geoff Manaugh, Author of the popular website BLDGBLOG and recently of The BLDGBLOG Book, Chronicle Books [2009].
Usman Haque, Director of Haque Design; Research and founder of Pachube.com; and recent recipient of the 2009 World Technology Award (Art), Design Museum, 2008 (Interactive) Design of the Year Award and Wellcome Trust Sciart Award.
As well as Murray Fraser, Hanif Kara (tbc), Rachel Armstrong, Bob Sheil, Charles Walker, Tobi Schneidler, Marcos Cruz, Alvin Huang, Matt Webb, Stephen Gage, Ruairi Glynn, Alan Penn, Marjan Colletti and more.
Following on from Ruairi’s recent post on the Gantenbein Vinery Facade, I thought it would be nice to draw attention to another very cool robo-technique – robotic perforation. Students from ETH Zurich have been working with Architects Gramazio & Kohler to create architectural screens based on different grids, variations and forms only realistically possible with some robotic assistance.
“Robots build! At their program in architecture and digital production at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), the architects Gramazio and Kohler have installed a research facility that is unique in the world. It is based on a computer-controlled industrial robot that produces construction elements directly from design data. The robot works flexibly with a tremendous range of tools and materials.”
“With the help of algorithmic tools, we were able to manipulate the contours, dimensions, angles, and the sequence of openings, which could take any regular or irregular form.”
A bit of a ‘chicken or egg’ situation, I’m always interested to see how new techniques arise to make new design technically and economically feasible. Buying slaves to build your grand visions is so yesterday. Thanks robotics. I can’t imagine (nor hope) such techniques will ever replace human craftsmanship. They will (are) however opening some very interesting new doors.
I particularily like the use of sound in this architecture augmented by projection. Daniel Rossa worked with Urbanscreen to create the 555 kubik facade video projection at the kunsthalle in hamburg (germany). giant hands appear to manipulate the surface of the museum in a surreal sequence that is the result of rossa asking the question ‘how it would be, if a house was dreaming?’.
At Crown Point high above Burnley town UK the ‘Singing-Ringing Tree’ – a unique musical sculpture in the form of a tree appears to bend against the endless winds that pass over the hills. Designed by award-winning architects Tonkin-Liu. The wind produces a low and mellow hum through pipes which are tuned so that they do not disturb the wildlife.
It was designed as one of four large-scale sculptures commissioned, designed and constructed over a six year period in the North West of England.
It involved the construction of series of 21st-century landmarks, or Panopticons (structures providing a comprehensive view), across East Lancashire, England, as symbols of the renaissance of the area. An interesting article by the independent newspaper can be found here.
Any of you out there who are code-minded may have come across wonderfl. Its something I’ve wanted to play with for a while, and now there is another great reason.
Wonderfl is (was) a web-based flash development environment. Perhaps that might sound a bit dull… not the case . The idea is: you type code into the web page, and compile it in the same page. A few seconds later, and your code is a fully functional demo sitting alongside what you’ve just written. This in itself is a major step, bearing in mind where flash came from: a big old application for timeline animation. What’s really great though is the ability for you to browse other user’s source code, test it, and add to it. By default, your code is covered by the MIT Open-Source License so in most cases you are free to use these other projects.
Add to that, the Funnel Server. Funnel is a set of libraries for Actionscript 3 (and Ruby and Processing), that provide a simple interface between these languages, and your hardware. You can use Gainer or Arduino or XBee… just add the libraries and you’ve got it all at your fingertips. Now, Wonderfl is a web-based physical computing development environment!
It is as simple as taking an existing experiment that uses mouse position as an input, for example, and swap the inputs for physical ones. As an introduction to physical computing, without the hassle of spending time understanding the ins and outs, it is perfect. Not for first time Actionscripters, perhaps, but there are a good mix of simple and complex projects, look through them here. I’m gonna go away and try it out.
This is the first project I came across on the site:
Interactive Architecture covers emerging architectural and artistic practices where digital technologies & virtual spaces merge with tangible and physical spatial experiences. An active architecture, sensing, observing, feeling, listening, thinking, reacting, proposing, adapting, learning, even sometimes interacting. It is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations.
. The idea is: you type code into the web page, and compile it in the same page. A few seconds later, and your code is a fully functional demo sitting alongside what you’ve just written. This in itself is a major step, bearing in mind where flash came from: a big old application for timeline animation. What’s really great though is the ability for you to browse other user’s source code, test it, and add to it. By default, your code is covered by the 
