Negotiated Materialization: Design Approaches Integrating Wood Heterogeneity Through Advanced Robotic Fabrication
Whilst robots are predictable, repetitive, predefined and constant, natural materials present unpredictable complexity. Over the past few centuries, materials have been standardized to fit industrial processes, in an attempt to defy this unpredictability.
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Abstract Whilst robots are predictable, repetitive, predefined and constant, natural materials present unpredictable complexity. Over the past few centuries, materials have been standardized to fit industrial processes, in an attempt to defy this unpredictability. Thanks to new advances in sensing technologies and computational design, today we have the opportunity to reintegrate the intrinsic properties of natural materials in their full complexity. What is the potential of a synthesis between the particularity of each specific material element—specific properties and parameters—informing the fabrication process? Digital and Robotic Fabrication are based on the use of flexible machines that open the possibility to mass-customize the production process. Combined with sensors and computational analysis, they allow to work with “soft systems”, both adaptable and continuously evolving, whose dynamism is constantly fed by a flow of information. How can the designer integrate this uncertainty and complexity in the design process? In this paper the authors specifically discuss the management of structural and material tolerance inherent to large scale construction and anisotropic materials, such as wood. A series of projects developed and built at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and the Bartlett School of Architecture are used as case studies to investigate tolerance management in Digital Fabrication with different kinds of wood.
G. Brugnaro The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Figliola School of Architecture and Design, University of Camerino, Ascoli Piceno, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Figliola Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy A. Dubor (B) Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 F. Bianconi and M. Filippucci (eds.), Digital Wood Design, Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03676-8_4
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Keywords Wood design · Parametric design and fabrication strategies CNC and woodworking technology · Complex wood structures
1 Introduction Within the context of industrial production, robotic fabrication processes are devised as short, constant and repetitive tasks, however, when handling natural, heterogeneous, materials, this requires to continuously adapt to the specificity of the material’s specific properties and behaviours. Recent advances in sensing technologies and computational processing allow to integrate such properties within our design tools through different layers of complexity. Once materials can actively inform the fabrication process, how can the synthesis of such information lead to novel design opportunities? In the selection of projects presented in this chapter, the flexibility of industrial robots provides the opportunity to explore the consequences of such new material understanding towards the customisation of production processes.
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