Digital Fabrication: Manufacturing Architecture in the Information Age (2001)
article⁄Digital Fabrication: Manufacturing Architecture in the Information Age (2001)
abstract⁄This paper addresses the recent digital technological advances in design and fabrication and the unprecedented opportunities they created for architectural design and production practices. It investigates the implications of new digital design and fabrication processes enabled by the use of rapid prototyping RP and computeraided manufacturing CAM technologies, which offer the production of smallscale models and fullscale building components directly from 3D digital models. It also addresses the development of repetitive nonstandardized building systems through digitally controlled variation and serial differentiation, i.e. masscustomization, in contrast to the industrialage paradigms of prefabrication and mass production. The paper also examines the implications of the recent developments in the architectural application of the latest digital design and fabrication technologies, which offer alternatives to the established understandings of architectural design and production processes and their material and economic constraints. Such critical examination should lead to a revised understanding of the historic relationship between architecture and its means of production.
