Digital and Manual Joints (2008)
article⁄Digital and Manual Joints (2008)
abstract⁄This paper considers the problem of detailing joints between manual and digital construction by tracking the provocations of KieranTimberlake’s SmartWrap research and the evolution of that knowledge into practical architectural instruments that can be deployed into more traditional construction projects. Over the past several years, KieranTimberlake Associates in Philadelphia has undertaken a path of research focusing on problems of contemporary construction systems and practices. One product of this research was a speculative wall system assembled for a museum exhibit. SmartWrap was to be a digitally prefabricated wall system with embedded technology. While they have yet to wrap a building with SmartWrap, KieranTimberlake have utilized a number of the construction principles and digital tools tested in the SmartWrap exhibit. One of the most important principles, prefabrication, was explored in a fasttrack construction project at the Sidwell Friends School. The compressed schedule drove the design of an enclosure system which incorporated performative elements in similar categories to SmartWrap insulation, an electrical system, view, daylighting, and a rainscreen. Besides being a prefabricated facade system, the rainscreen detailing became a formal system for organizing many other scales of the project including site systems, thermal systems, daylighting systems, enclosure, and ornament. At a second project, a similar wood rainscreen strategy was used. However, at the Loblolly House the question of prefabrication and digital modeling was tested far more extensively thermal systems were embedded into prefabricated floor cartridges, entire program elements a library, kitchen, and bathroom were proposed as prefabricated systems of selfcontained volume and infrastructure which were then inserted into the onsite framework. In all three projects the joint between manualimprecise construction and digitalprecise prefabrication became the area of richest invention Figure 1. SmartWrap may not have yielded flexible, plastic architecture but its conceptual and practical questions have yielded tangible implications for the designconstruction processes and the built product in KieranTimberlake’s practice.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Authors |
Wallick, Karl. |
| Issue |
Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation, |
| Pages |
370-375 |
| Library link |
N/A |
| Entry filename |
digital-manual-joints |
