the charged void

the charged voiD

Summer Semester 2006

EPFL_ENAC_LAPA
Laboratoire de la production d’architecture
Prof. Harry Gugger
Summer Semester 2006
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The charged void 1

zoning plan
Semester Introduction 5
Zoning Plan 7

PROGRAMME
Summer Semester Schedule 2006 8
Workshop 11
Lectures 13
Prof. W. J. Mitchell 15
Seminar 17

PHASES
1: Feasibility Study 19
2: Schematic Design 21
3: Design Development 23
4: Construction Documentation 25
5: Presentation Documentation 27

Constitutions summary
Winter Semester 2005/06 29

lapa CHAIR
Contacts 41
How to find LAPA 43
Semester Evaluation 44
Glossary 45
Zoning Definitions 46

source book
Articles, Bibliography, Links 49
4
the charged void
introduction

The urban constitutions transformed allowing for a higher permeability

into a new zoning plan and transforming what acts now as a
boundary into an active linear interface
The five proposals for an urban
between the Universities and the adjacent
constitution that resulted from the winter
neighbourhoods. We propose to apply the
semester form the basis of our work in
same principle to the Route Cantonal and
this summer semester. We incorporated
the Avenue du Tir Fédéral. This creates
the common and most convincing
the opportunity to make the triangle
elements of these proposals in a new
apparent on the ground and give it a
zoning plan (plan d’affectation, PAC) for
distinct identity.
the EPFL, the UNIL and the adjacent
communities of Ecublens and Chavannes.
The void as a centre
The proposed zoning plan is extending For the centre of the Triangle we
beyond the limits of the original PAC propose a park that results from the
and is looking at the whole area within transformation of the existing sports
the Triangle that is defined by the Route fields. This leads to an extraordinary
Cantonal in the south, the Avenue du Tir configuration where the centre of gravity
Fédéral in the west and the autoroute E23 is created by a void. Tokyo with the
in the east. Imperial gardens in the centre is the best
known example of such a configuration
The triangle as an obvious and symbolic and London’s Regents Park is a perfect
urban figure reference for the design and function of
the proposed central park.
The chosen extension of the proposed
new PAC is not arbitrary. The three
This void is a generous gift from the
mentioned roads are acting as clear
Universities to the society. In return
boundaries defining an obvious and
the Universities will have to ask for
symbolic urban figure that has the
a multifunctional (including housing)
potential to become a prototypical
and much denser environment on their
environment for a true knowledge
current sites. They are surely well
community that includes not only
equipped with the necessary negotiation
the usual stakeholders – Education /
power thru their gift.
Research / Industry – but also the society
as a whole.

The masterplan “Lausanne Ouest”

already proposes to transform the
autoroute E23 in an urban boulevard
1
The project interventions as a proof of outdated sequence model which will
concept become more and more blurred or will
be omitted altogether by the extensive
The urban figure established on the basis
use of Information Technologies. The
of the presented urban constitutions
digital chain allows us to make immediate
forms only a first step. In this summer
jumps between concept and product
semester the students will have to create
and transforms the traditional layers of
a “proof of concept” by developing a
representation or makes them completely
multifunctional project on the basis of the
redundant. We find ourselves in the
new zoning plan. Thru their projects the
paradoxical situation where we use the
urban figure will be tested for its viability,
traditional design phases as a didactical
its qualities and its potential.
concept only to convince our students
of the fact that the traditional design
The sites for their interventions are
sequence is outdated.
located in all neuralgic points of our
urban figure – along the peripheral roads;
on the boundary to the central park;
within the existing structures of the EPFL,
respectively the UNIL – just to list some of
them. The sheer number of interventions
will allow us to extrapolate the final stage
of the “Triangle of Knowledge”.

The semester structured like a project

Like the planning of an ordinary
project the summer semester will be
structured by design phases – feasibility
study; schematic design; detailed
design; construction documents and
presentation. We are convinced that this
measure creates an efficient didactical
framework that serves our ambition to
make the projects as “real” as possible.

It is not to say that we believe in this

traditional design approach, on the
contrary we want to challenge this

4
2
3
1
semester introduction
Summer Semester 2006
The Campus Constitution results from
the past semester proposed long-
range vision for the physical, social, and
organizational evolution of the EPFL &
UniL campuses. Moving forward from this
work, the LAPA studio now shifts scale,
to that of the architectural project. The
knowledge gained in the past semester
provides an excellent foundation of
knowledge and data for the project work
of the LAPA SS06 semester.
Topic
For this semester, participants will work
on the campus in its present-day state,
using the supplied zoning plan, and will
develop architectural projects which
can be seen as “keystones” towards the
objectives set forth in their constitutions.
Groups and Complexity
For the semester, participants
should form a design team which is
representative of the complexity and
size of the intended project. Participants
may work individually or in groups of up
to four architects. The decision of team
and program should reflect the desire to
pursue a specific architectural research
and typology.
Technology and Systems
The development of the architectural
projects should be addressed with the
same procedural methodology as in
the last semester. Over the course of
the semester there will be workshops,
lectures and seminars to introduce new
technologies and new concepts of design
methodology so as to enlighten the
participants’ procedural knowledge and
inspire their design.
Methodology
This semester is structured to represent
the typical workflow of an architectural
project. In the process of designing and
developing their architectural intervention
on the campus, participants will also
be required to follow the “architectural
project process” through a simplified
version of the professional methodology:
Feasibility Study (FS), Schematic
Design (SD), Design Development (DD),
Construction Documentation (CD), and
finally Presentation Documentation (PD).
Reviews
Following the methodology of the
architectural process, reviews will be
conducted at the times where important
client – architect meetings typically occur,
after the FS, the SD, and for final PD.
Informal studio-reviews will occur in the
more design-intensive phases of DD &
CD.
1
5
zoning plan
new pac

The initial basis for the work of this

semester will be the “new PAC” campus
zoning plan.
This new PAC is based in part on the
zoning systems, regulations, and
definitions of the communities that
surround the EPFL/UniL campus, and
in part on an analysis and abstraction of
the common goals from last semester’s
Campus Constitution work. The zoning
plan sets the regulatory conditions for
architectural projects on the present-day
campus.
As with other regulatory documents
from the surrounding communities,
specific prescriptive regulations are
not pre-defined for all zones in the new
PAC. During the first phase, Feasibility
Study, the participants will be required
to complete a Feasible Study Briefing
Document for their chosen site. The data
submitted in this document will form the
regulatory basis for the site and guide the
development for the rest of the semester.
Zones that are open for student projects
are the Federal & Cantonal owned lands,
and are identified by hatching. Zones
that are privately owned, and not suitable
for development in this semester are
indicated by solid colour.
A full explanation of the new PAC will
be presented at the introduction to the
semester. Descriptions for each of the
regulatory zoning types are available in
the Zoning Definitions at the end of this
Book.
1
7
 Schedule Summer Term 2006

Week W11 W12 W13 W14 W15 W16 W17

16/17.03. 23/24.03 30/31.03. 06/07.04. 13/14.04. 20/21.04. 27/28.04.

Good Friday Easter Holiday

Lecture 16.03./ 10.15 23.03./10.15 06/04./10.15 13.04./10.15

AAC 114 AAC 114 AAC 114 AAC 114
Introduction H. Gugger R.Blättler S.Chessex

FS-Feasibility Study SD-Schematic Design

Deliveries FS - Data book SD - 2 A0 / student

FS presentation SD breifing book
Site + sketch model SD sketch model

Review GC F1 10 AAC 114 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 AAC 114

Input Planning Codes Technology Tuesday

Seminar 25.04./18.00
06- 18:00 - A. Walz TBC
07 - day- Workshops Gugger/Giagiani
07 - 17:30 - F. Scheurer Inaugural Lecture
Guest 08 - day- Workshops

Miscalleanus

8
 Programme
Summer Semester Schedule 2006

W18 W19 W20 W21 W22 W23 W24 W25

04/05.05. 11/12.05. 18/19.05. 25/26.05. 01/02.06. 08/09.06. 15/16.06. 22/23.06.

Ascension

18.05. / 10.15 08.06. / 10.15

AAC 114 AAC 114
R.Loveridge S.Frommenwiler

DD-Design Develop. CD-Construction Documentation PD-Presentation Documentation

DD - breifing book Traditional CD - A0 Presentaion pannels -A0

Technology-output Digital CD - multimedia Consolidation Book
CD Breifing Book A3 Digital PD presentation

GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 GC F1 10 TBC

03.05. / 18.00 Production

SG 1 Charrette TBC
Bill Mitchell
Public Lecture
Bill Mitchell
Seminar Marcel Meili ?
Wiel Arets ?

9
workshop
Lapa technology seminar
This semester there will be no seminar
trip, instead there will be an intensive
LAPA Technology Seminar Weekend. This
session used to introduce and expose the
participants of the LAPA studio to various
technologies and digital tools that can be
used immediately in the development and
production of their semester projects.
The goal of this seminar is to present
advanced design concepts and
technologies for use in the contemporary
architectural process. The workshops
will give participants “hands-on”
introductions to a selection of software
and hardware “tools”, and is intended to
“inspire” the use of these technologies in
the project work.
The weekend seminar will take place at
the EPFL, and the format will be similar
to the format used at professional and
academic conferences. The Seminar
weekend will begin on Thursday evening
with a keynote lecture by an invited
lecturer, followed by an apèro where
participants are introduced to the invited
guest tutors who will be running the
workshops of the following two days.
Friday and Saturday will be divided
into morning and afternoon workshop
sessions where participants will be given
direct “hands-on” training with four
different digital technologies from CAAD
& CAM.
Friday evening there will be a second
invited lecture, followed by a conference
dinner for all participants.
Saturday afternoon will conclude with a
wrap-up discussion of the technologies
presented and their potential for changing
the mandate and methodology of the
architect of the future.
Thursday April 06
17:00 - Introduction & welcome
18:00 - Keynote Lecture
20:00 - Introduction Apero
Friday April 07
09:00 - Workshop introduction & coffee
09:30 - Workshop session 1
12:30 - Lunch
14:00 - Workshop session 2
17:30 - Lecture 2
20:00 - Participants Dinner
Saturday April 08
09:00 - Workshop session 3
12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Workshop session 4
16:00 - Concluding Discussion
11
Lectures
summer Semester 2006

The lecture series will follow the structure

of the semester, which is based on the
design phases:

Lecture 1: Feasibility Study

23.3.06, 10:15 h, AAC 114
Prof. Harry Gugger

Lecture 2: Schematic Design

6.4.06, 10:15 h, AAC 114
Ralph Blättler

Lecture 3: Design Development

13.4.06, 10:15 h, AAC 114
Simon Chessex

Guest Lecture: Constructing Complexity

03.5.06, 18:00 h, SG 01
Prof. William J. Mitchell

Lecture 4: Construction Documentation

18.5.06, 10:15 h, AAC 114
Russell Loveridge

Lecture 5: Presentation Documentation

8.6.06, 10:15 h, AAC 114
Simon Frommenwiler

13
william j. mitchell
CONSTRUCtING cOMPLEXITY
Head, Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This semester LAPA is pleased to invite
Prof. Bill Mitchell to collaborate with
the LAPA studio Campus Construction.
In addition to his public lecture, as
part of the ENAC-Architecture Lecture
Series, Prof. Mitchell will conduct a 2
day seminar with the LAPA studio on the
topic of Design Development : Technology
in Architecture.
William J. Mitchell is Director of the
MIT Design Laboratory, Professor
of Architecture and Media Arts
and Sciences, and Director of the
Smart Cities Research Group at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Media Lab.
The focus of Prof. Mitchell’s research
and teaching is the multidisciplinary
interaction and integration of technology
in design, architecture and society.
He teaches and conducts research in
design theory, computer applications in
architecture and design, and imaging and
image synthesis. As a long time member
of the Media Lab, Prof. Mitchell has
participated in multidisciplinary courses
ranging from concept vehicle design
(in cooperation with architect Frank
O. Gehry and General Motors) to the
development of urban geo-referenced
information systems for handheld mobile
computing devices.
of Media Arts and Sciences Program.
During the recent period of extensive
construction of major projects on the
MIT campus, Prof. Mitchell served as
Architectural Advisor to the President
of MIT, to counsel on projects such as
Simmons Hall, by Steven Holl Architects,
and the recent Stata Centre, By Frank O.
Gehry and Partners.
Among his publications are:
Placing Words: Symbols, Space and the
City (MIT Press, 2005)
Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked
City (MIT Press, 2003)
e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We
Know It, (MIT Press, 1999)
High Technology and Low-Income
Communities, with D. A. Schön and
B. Sanyal (MIT Press, 1998)
City of Bits: Space, Place, and the
Infobahn. (MIT Press, 1995)
He also writes a monthly column for the
RIBA Journal in London.
Public Lecture
3.5.06, 18:00 h, SG 01

In the fourteen years Prof. Mitchell has

been at MIT he has held the distinguished
positions of Dean of the School of
Architecture and Planning and Head
15
lapa studio seminar
Prof. William j. mitchell

Technology in Architecture Prof. Mitchell will be available to discuss

the detail design development, assist with
This two day seminar will take place
the ideas of integrating technology into
on May 4th and 5th, in the LAPA studio
the process and into the architecture,
during the Design Development phase of
and criticize the overall architectural
the semester project.
projects and their proposed production
methodology.
For these two days Prof. Bill Mitchel
will make morning presentations on
The seminar will conclude on Friday
design theory and project work relating
afternoon with a general round-table
to the evolving use of technology in
discussion on possible next steps for
architecture. Afternoons he will also be
“Campus Architecture” and the idea of
on hand in studio to work with the studio
campus buildings being developed as
participants.
“test platforms” for future technological,
sociological, and architectural research.
The more “formal” morning sessions
are intended to present participants with
Within academia, this connection
design theory, technological history,
between new digital technologies and
and information on the current state of
architecture offers an interesting
technology in architecture. This includes
platform for research in the fields of
the issues of production technology
design, engineering, manufacturing,
in the design, manufacturing and
sociology, psychology, and computer
construction of architecture, as well
science. The goal of this seminar is to
as the implementation of “interactive”
improve the overall knowledge of the
technology into buildings and their
studio participants, and give their projects
environment which mediate the way that
the potential to be seen as “innovative
the users interact with their surrounding
architecture” which promotes both new
architecture and environment.
lifestyle possibilities and the research in
these fields conducted at the EPFL and
the UniL.
The informal afternoon sessions are
intended to allow the studio participants
to opportunity to discuss how these
LAPA Studio Seminar
technologies could relate specifically
to their projects, and how to develop 4.5.06 + 5.5.06, LAPA Studio
the designs to properly reflect the
implementation of these technologies. 17
Feasibility
Study
Phase 1
The first phase of an architectural Schedule
project is to acknowledge a client brief,
Introduction to SS06: March 16
and to conduct analysis to determine the
Assignment hand-out: March 16
feasibility of a project. A Feasibility Study
Lecture Feasibility Study : March 23
should outline the current physical,
Presentation & Review: March 30 & 31
infrastructural, and legal conditions
and restrictions of a site and develop a
“diagrammatic” approach to assessing Deliverables
its compatibility with the program of the
Client Brief. Feasibility Study-Briefing Book
(min. 4 x A3 sheets / team member)

Site model
Task
diagrammatic feasibility sketch model
For this phase participant teams are (scale 1: 500)
required to devise a project, chose a site
from the Knowledge Triangle Zoning Feasibility Study presentation
Plan, and prepare a feasibility study
which will guide the project.

Once the team and program has been

decided then a site must be chosen from
within the given Knowledge Triangle
Zoning Plan. The overall project proposal
should be discussed with the tutors to
ensure it is “feasible” and also to ensure
that the chosen site is available (only one
project per site).

The design team should balance the

project issues of program, complexity,
& size, with the resources of the team
members. The team is then required to
analyze and prepare a feasibility study
and complete the Feasibility Study
Briefing Document.
19
schematic
design
Phase 2
The second phase of an architectural materiality and construction should
project is the Schematic Design. The be devised. By the conclusion of the
schematic design transforms the Schematic Design phase, there should be
diagrammatic descriptions of the enough documentation and detail from
Feasibility Study into a functional, logical, which the entire project, both functionally
thematic, and aesthetic architectural and physically, can be explained.
“parti” – an overall design concept.
Schedule
Within this phase the contextual issues of
site and connection are addressed, and Assignment hand-out: March 31
solutions for basic issues of structure, Lecture Schematic Design: April 06
materials, overall aesthetics, and Lapa Technology Workshop: April 06-08
volumetric relationships are explored. Lecture Design Development: April 13
Most importantly, the Schematic Design Presentation & Review: April 27 & 28
is the point at which an identifiable
architectural expression – the overall
Deliverables
character - of the project is formulated.
Schematic Design
(min. 2 - A0 sheets / team member)
Task
For this phase the design team will Schematic Design & project sketch model
develop a Schematic Design for their (scale 1: 500) built upon the site model
project. The Schematic Design should from FS
address larger issues of relationships
both within and outside the project Project Briefing Document
boundaries. It must take into account (A3 document, format to be given)
the surrounding context (including
other proposed projects by other design
teams), and deal with issues of boundary,
connection and content.

Each team member should take

responsibility for at least one major
design issue of the project, this will
assist with project development and
coordination. Strategies for the primary
issues of function, infrastructure,

21
4
design
development
Phase 3
The third phase of an architectural
project is Design Development. In this
phase the overall design is refined,
and smaller scale details are designed
which reinforce the overall parti. This
process finalizes the design integration
of larger issues of structure, materiality,
construction system, and sub-systems.
The goal of this phase is to strengthen
the parti by completing and refining the
design at all scales, and to generate
expressive or appropriate details that
will guide the process of deciding
on the techniques and technologies
to be employed for fabrication and
construction.
Task
For this phase each member of the
design group will work independently and
will develop details from their identified
area of responsibility (from the SD
brief). Each participant is to identify a
minimum of two details of different scale,
and develop them to be supportive of the
overall project parti.
Each participant will be required to
produce a set of development drawings,
renderings, or 3D models for their chosen
details. These investigations should
identify a number of possible solutions
for each design problem, state the most
suitable solution, give its advantages
and disadvantages, and finally render or
present it so that its relation to the overall
project design can be understood.
Schedule
Assignment hand-out: April 28
Lapa Seminar: May 4 & 5
Studio presentation : May 11 & 12
Devliverables
Design Development Book
(min. 6 x A3 pages)
Technology Report
(A3 document, format to be given)
This report will be supported by the
seminar with Prof. Mitchell and Prof.
Huang

The seminar sessions scheduled for

May 4 & 5 with Prof. William J. Mitchell,
Director of the MIT Design Lab and Prof.
Jeff Huang will be conducted to support
this phase of the project, introduce new
digital technologies, and to reflect on the
overall integration of technology into the
project design.

23
construction
documentation
Phase 4
In order to fabricate, manufacture,
assemble, and construct architecture,
there needs to be a systematic, efficient,
precise, and highly communicative
set of construction documents. These
documents must accurately represent
every design aspect of the building,
and must give adequate instruction
for the contractors to devise the most
appropriate construction process.
The quality and accuracy of construction
documents is usually directly
proportional to the number of difficulties
during the construction process, and the
ensuing final quality of the architecture
and build.
Task
For this phase each team is required
to develop a series of construction
documents for parts of their design.
Tutors will discuss with the different
groups what type of documentation is
appropriate for the projects and the
architectural details being described.
Each group should develop key areas
of their design in CD’s using traditional
(CAD) drawing. The drawings should be
the standards of plan, section, elevation,
or isometric - as required for tender
to a primary building contractor or
for submission for part drawings by a
component supplier.
The second step of this phase is to
develop a different set of CD’s using
alternative “digital CD concepts”.
Construction Documents in the future
will likely not be printed on paper. The
seminars and workshops will have
presented alternatives to the traditional
Construction Document paper plans – at
this point the teams are encouraged to
devise digitally formatted Construction
Documents which will enable the “digital
construction site” to evolve.
Schedule
Assignment hand-out: May 12
Lecture Construction Documents: May 18
Studio presentation: June 01 & 02
Deliverables
Traditional construction documentation
(1 A0 sheet / team member)
Digitally produced “Alternative CD”
(model or presentation)
Construction Documentation briefing
document
(A3 document, format to be given)
25
1
presentation
documentation
Phase 5
The final phase of the traditional
architectural process is the fabrication of
“mock-ups” and “construction samples”
in order to get an accurate sense of how
the final building will be built and what its
actual character will be at the 1:1 scale.
The development of new digital
technologies is dramatically changing the
process of making these experimental
models and simulations. Digital
CAD models allow for textured and
illuminated “fly through” simulations
of real spaces. Digital composite films
explain and simulate the construction
and daily living of a proposed building,
and CNC and RP CAM machines allow for
fast and efficient fabrication of custom
components that can be assembled as
mock-up, or even as the actual building
construction components.
project, and how this proposed project
will improve the quality of life on the
campus - in keeping with the overall
goals of the Campus Constitution.
2. The role of new technologies in
the architectural methodology: The
incorporation of new technologies into
architecture for use by their occupants
The use of new technologies in the act of
making innovative architecture.
Schedule
Assignment hand-out: June 02
Lecture Presentation: June 08
Final Presentation: June 22 & 23
Deliverables
Presentation panels
(min. 1 A0 sheet / team member)

Task Digital “Presentation Document”

(presentation using digital technologies)
The final task of the project is to
compile the documentation for the
Consolidation Briefing Book
entire architectural design project into
A3 documentation of all of the
a Consolidation Brief. This document
development work from all phases of the
will describe the entire project from
project
feasibility study to the final design and
construction process. From this final
Project Data Archive
document, the team should prepare a
(Organized data CD containing all data
final presentation of the project which
from project)
address two main issues:

1. The proposed architectural project

for the campus: The design, program,
and implementation of the architectural
27
4
campus constitution
summary
WS 2005/06
This semester is the second half of a
one year project focussing on the topic
of EPFL & UNIL campuses in Lausanne,
Switzerland.
The task for this first semester was
the development of future planning
strategies for the combined university
campuses. The participants were
asked to research five specific issues
related to functional, organizational,
and physical design of the campus.
These five topics were: The social and
ecological environment, the political and
administrative organization, pedagogic
and social functions, the landscape
& topography, and traffic planning &
circulation.
The final amalgamation of all research
and analysis took the form of a Campus
Constitution – a strategic and procedural
approach to the planning of goals and
rules for the development of the future
campus.
The projects documented here are the
final presentations of the past semester,
presented as the possible manifestations
of the procedural constitutions. The
common goals derived from the five
constitutions are:
Densification of the current campus
territory, both sociologically and
structurally to include residential living
and provision of services, to create a
pseudo urban environment.
A re-emphasis of the ground plane
to improve orientation, pedestrian
circulation, landscape design, and overall
quality of the surrounding environment.
Strengthening of the North-South
connections through the campus so as
to reduce the “hard boundary” of the
campus and make it welcoming and
permeable for its neighbours.
Establishing the Campus and the north-
recreation parklands as a continuation of
the lakeside “Green Link” – connecting
the campus to the city and Lausanne to
the west.
Recognizing the different quadrants
of the campuses, and reinforcing their
typologies, both in terms of architecture,
and functional planning.
These five common goals, obtained
from the five distinct constitutions, form
the basis for this semesters program
of developing individual architectural
proposals for the current campus, which
should act as keystones towards campus
evolution of the future.
29
1
Constitution No 1
Le triangle universitaire
The triangle is considered as part of the general urban
fabric, rather than a campus. A neighbourhood with a
strong identity, where functions and uses are mixed in
order to provide the necessary facilities for the daily
life. Three main circulation axes as well as symbolic
constructions on its corners - creating links beyond
its boundaries - define the perimeter of the “triangle
universitaire”.
The area consists of three distinct urban typologies; a
reflection of the existing institutions and municipalities,
surrounding a central park and crossed by forest.
An inner circle is the “life line” of the neighbourhood.
Most public facilities, shops and education buildings are
displayed along this route.
The constitution has a clear strategy of mobility and
environment, which becomes a part of the triangle’s
identity. Public and non-motorised transport modes are
enhanced. The shuttle “serpentine” connects the whole
neighbourhood.
Constitution No 2
Knowledge Park
The goal for this constitution is to guide the evolution of
the EPFL/UNIL towards a dynamic social and academic
campus, which is conscious of its scale and how it
integrates into the larger surrounding context.
The concept of different quarters emerges through
analysis and identification of existing spatial and
functional qualities. The continuous green zones and the
main north-south axis define the quarters. The ambition
is to emphasise on the specific identities of the different
parts, whilst the corridors in-between connect the
campus to the surrounding communities.
Densification and reorganisation of the existing, will
provide new space for the growth of academic functions
and the number of students. A more diverse set of
programs within the campus will generate more social
activities and interaction. A new “Forum” defines the part
of the Knowledge Park, where the EPFL and UNIL come
together. Existing qualities, such as the view to the lake
and the mountains or the landscape will be preserved.
Constitution No 3
The Green Link
The Campus is part of the existing Park along the
lakeside.
To create a bigger public interest new functions will be
added onto the site.
The Campus will integrate, conserve and enhance the
green areas.
The project proposes a densification and rehabilitation of
potentially misused space.
Most of the general functions and services of the school
are concentrated along the two existing main axes
(esplanade and main spine on level 2).
In the north sector is a park, which is the new center in
bet-ween the new development of the campus and the
ongoing enlargement of the city.
Constitution No 4
To the Groundfloor
The concept of this project is to re-establish the main
campus circulation on the groundfloor.
The authors propose a very simple operation: cutting
through all the deadends of the campus, in order to
create an efficient and lively groundfloor.
It’s a very clear and operational strategy, which could
solve a lot of problems in terms of identity, orientation,
circulation, access etc.
All the public functions (shops, restaurants, librairies
etc.) and all the main entrances to the buildings are
therefore located on the groundfloor.
The project proposes to create two main poles:
1. An urban plaza with an iconic building (“President’s
Tower”).
2. A forum in the center of the EPFL/UNIL Campus,
mainly green space with the best view of the campus.
Constitution No 5
The City Campus
The campus should be a motor and have a strong identity
in the West Lausanne development.
Different kind of quarters are established, the quarters
vary in: density, functions, height of the buildings, puplic
access, permeability, compatibility with the existing
structure and outdoor spaces.
The Campus will integrate, conserve and enhance the
green.
A minimal ratio of all activities and functions in each
quarter creates a maximum of mixity and life all over the
campus.
It’s planned to bring dwelling with it‘s functions and needs
into the campus in a proportion such as to make it a lively
place respecting it‘s future academic developpement.
A platform for collaboration between EPFL and UNIL will
be created to organize and control future developpements.
Densification is orientated mainly to the north.
4
lapa chair
contacts
Laboratoire de la production d`architecture
EPFL ENAC IA LAPA
Bâtiment GC H2 614
CH-1015 Lausanne

http://lapa.epfl.ch
lapa@epfl.ch
Tel +41 21 69 314 82
Fax +41 21 69 362 60

Harry Gugger
Professor
harry.gugger@epfl.ch
+41 21 69 332 14

Ralph Blättler
Teaching Assistant
ralph.blaettler@epfl.ch
+41 79 218 81 10

Simon Chessex
Teaching Assistant
s.chessex@lacroixchessex.ch
+41 78 666 90 29

Simon Frommenwiler
Teaching Assistant
frommenwiler@hhf.ch
+41 76 321 14 09

Russell Loverdige
Research Assistant
russell.loveridge@epfl.ch
+41 21 69 314 83

Henriette Spoerl
Research Assistant
henriette.spoerl@epfl.ch
+41 21 69 314 82

41
1
4
how to find
lapa?
LAPA Office
epfl map Building GC Zone/Niveau H2 Office 614

LAPA Studio

Building GC Zone/Level F1 Atelier 10

adjacent Hall F

To reach the LAPA Office and the Atelier: 1

take entry GC from main passerelle on level 2
Semester Evaluation
The emphasis of evaluation of the
semester is on individual work. If any
student wishes to develop an individual
project of reduced size or complexity, this
is fully acceptable. Since the set goals for
this semester are very challenging, LAPA
is in full support of group work. All work
will be evaluated individually.
There are two specific reasons for this:
The Bologna Declaration on the
European space for Higher Education
which guides the academic programs at
the Bachelors and Masters Level states:
Each student work should be discernable
as independent and evaluated
individually.
Architecture is a profession which relies
on the cumulative work of many different
disciplines to develop and support the
process of architectural design and
production. To work successfully as
an architect there must be respect
and an understanding of the other
collaborative disciplines as well as other
designers within the team. The mandate
for the Laboratoire de la production
d’architecure, is to study, evaluate, and
develop the different architectural issues
that combine to create projects of the
highest quality.
4
44
To satisfy these criteria the evaluation
of student work will be based on the
following criteria:
Understanding of the task
Pertinence of analysis
Quality of decisions in the evolution of
analysis to proposal
Development of logical process that
relate to planning strategies and
syntheses.
Coherence of the proposal to the given
assignment and defined scenario.
Quality of the potential social and physical
design
Quality of representation, graphics and
content
Experimentation with process and
technology
Individual contribution to the process of
group work
Individual contributions to presentations
and discourse
Each phase of this semester requires
a balance between the individual
contribution, and the logical and
methodological integration of the
individual work into a unified project.
glossary
This glossary is included so as to facilitate
the understanding of words within the
LAPA project context. It is not intended
to be a comprehensive dictionary of
complete definitions. Ref: definitions
Feasibility Study - FS
An FS should outline the current
physical, infrastructural, and regulatory
conditions of a site; compare this
information to the proposed Client, and
determine the best conditions for a
successful acceptance of a project.
Schematic Design - SD
SD translates the diagrammatic
findings from the FS, into a scheme or
architectural parti, for a project. The
SD should address the main issues
of aesthetics and style, geometry,
structure, materiality, relations to
site & context. A successful SD allows
all parties involved in the project to
understand and generally foresee the
project when built.
Design Development - DD
DD refines the schematic design into a
“constructable” building. More detailed
issues of design, functionality, and
inhabitation are determined, and smaller
scales of detail are resolved. The data
and material developed at this phase has
high value in the next phase processes of
deciding on the processes and systems
of fabrication and assembly.
Construction Documentation - CD
CD’s have traditionally been the detailed
design drawings that are given to the
contractor to be used as the basis for
“shop drawings” (in the production of
parts and components) or “site drawings”
(for the on-site construction) – “plan de
règles”. New technologies are changing
this tradition. Digital documents,
drawings, and models will more and
more be developed and used in the direct
fabrication of architecture.
Presentation Documentation - PD
PDs are used to fully explain and present
the project, or detailed parts of the
project, to interested parties both within
and outside of the Client-Architect-
Consultants team. PD’s traditionally have
been drawings, renderings, models, and
mock-ups used for many tasks ranging
from design decisions to the marketing
of the project to prospective investors or
purchasers. New digital technologies
and media are also effective PD’s and
include CAD- engineering analysis,
3D-CAD renderings, animations, “walk-
throughs”, and simulations, animated
simulations of the construction process,
CNC fabricated models and mock-ups,
and even CNC fabricated components for
the construction.
CAM
Computer Aided Manufacturing
CNC
Computer Numerically Controlled – used
to identify machines that are controlled
using specific digital file systems. This is
the primary controlling system for large
CAM machines used in industry.
45
1
zoning Definitions
PAC229
Current “Plan D’Affection Cantonal”
Formulated in 1990 to insure
“harmonious” development of the
universities and the public interest on the
Federal and Cantonal campus lands.
new PAC
The zoning plan developed from the
five WS05 group constitutions and
surrounding community zoning plans.
Axis Zone
Zones designated to facilitate and
preserve movement, view and open
space. These zones are seen primarily
as defining the circulation paths
across, and should be reinforced
with appropriate feeding circulation
connections, and at larger nodal points
they may be reinforced with appropriate
supporting function.
Greenspace Zone
Zones designated for recreation, view,
and social & environmental appreciation.
These zones within the campus are open
for landscape development, conditional
upon a feasible proposal for preservation
of their intended function. Constructions
on these sites are strictly limited to
technical or public utilities supporting
the greenspace mandate.
Institutional Zone
Based on the definition of “Zone d`activité
mixte” from the PAC229. This zone is
designated for the public and private
activities in relation to the mission of
the Universities. This includes the full
range of activities of teaching, study, and
4
46
research; and is also inclusive of student
and support residences. Public Interests
are also allowed within the Institutional
Zone without variance, but are subject to
a circulation and environmental impact
assessment. The buildings within
institutional zones should respect the
surrounding typology including building
massing and height limits.
Preservation Zone
All area within this zone are protected for
environmental or historical reasons. No
project may disturb these grounds, and
adjoining projects may have additional
restrictions of increased set-backs
applied.
Public Interest Zone
For the establishment of projects of
federal, cantonal, or principally public
interest. This zoning also allows for
the implementation of “necessary light
infrastructure” in support of other
neighbouring functions.
Residential Zone
For light density residential purposes
only. All proposed projects must respect
the surrounding residential typologies,
(where appropriate) and must specifically
address zoning issues of circulation
loading and environmental impact
Urban Zone
Based on the definition of “Zone d`activité
mixte” from the PAC229, and the definition
of “Zone urbaine” from the Chavannes
RPA. Primary and proportional function
is for residential dwellings. Additionally
variance for small scale support
functions: work offices, artistic studios,
social or small medical support clinics,
schools or day care, or commercial
function not exceeding 500m2

Forested Areas
The “Aire forestière” is protected in
the PAC229, and is a feature which is
represented in all zones within the plan.
The character and intention of these
areas should be preserved with priority.

Waterway Areas
Waterways, including the Sorge river are
to be preserved with highest priority. In
areas where development is allowed
within proximity to waterways, this
development must address ecological
and environmental impact upon the
waterways and their immediate context.

47
1
4
source book
articles

1_ Architecture

- Vitruvius, “The education of an architect” excerpt from Ten books on architecture

- William J. Mitchell, “School houses / virtual campus” excerpt from City of bits
- William J. Mitchell, “Home and Neighborhoods” excerpt from E-topia
- Robin Pogrebin, “Now at Design Schools, Big concepts on Campus” excerpt from
The New York Times, September 26, 2005
- FOA, “Design Evolution” excerpt from The Yokohama Project

2_ Construction & Systems

- Charles Jenks, “Changing architecture”, preface of Informal from Cecil Balmond

- Susan Diesenhouse, “Architects’ pace rapidly builds” excerpt from Chicago Trib-
une, January 22, 2006

3_ Digital technology

- Clive Thompson, “The Dream Factory” excerpt from Wired 12.11

- Jessie Scanlon, “Frank Gehry for the Rest of US” excerpt from Wired 12.11
- Branko Kolarevic, “Digital Fabrication: from Digital to Material”excerpt from Archi-
tecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing

49
1_ ARCHITECTURE
“THE EDUCATION OF THE ARCHITECT”
Excerpt from: The Ten Books on Architecture
By: Vitruvius

1. The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and
varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other
arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. Practice is the
continuous and regular exercise of employment where manual work is done with
any necessary material according to the design of a drawing. Theory, on the other
hand, is the ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the
principles of proportion.

2. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill
without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to
correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholar-
ship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a
thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained
their object and carried authority with them.

3. In all matters, but particularly in architecture, there are these two points:- the
thing signified, and that which gives it its significance. That which is signified is
the subject of which we may be speaking; and that which gives significance is a
demonstration on scientific principles. It appears, then, that one who professes
himself an architect should be well versed in both directions. He ought, therefore, to
be both naturally gifted and amenable to instruction. Neither natural ability without
instruction nor instruction without natural ability can make the perfect artist. Let
him be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much his-
tory, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some
knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with
astronomy and the theory of the heavens.

4. The reasons for all this are as follows. An architect ought to be an educated man
so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises. Secondly, he must have
a knowledge of drawing so that he can readily make sketches to show the appear-
ance of the work which he proposes. Geometry, also, is of much assistance in archi-
tecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which
especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and
rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics, again,
the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. It is true that it
is by arithmetic that the total cost of buildings is calculated and measurements
are computed, but difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of
geometrical theories and methods.
“SCHOOL HOUSES / VIRTUAL CAMPUSES”
Excerpt from: City of Bits
By: Prof. William J. Mitchell

A teacher speaks; students listen and respond. The teacher has access to some
corpus of knowledge, beliefs, and practices, and makes this corpus available to the
students. Schools, colleges, and universities are spaces that exist primarily to bring
students and teachers to¬gether so that this sharing of a corpus can take place.

The underlying diagram of a school appears in its simplest and most beautiful form
when disciples gather within earshot of a guru in a place made by the shade of a
“bo tree”. The less sedentary Socrates strolled in a grove, with his disciples keep-
ing pace. The little red schoolhouse — appropriate to colder climates — puts the
students in a box with the teacher in front. Jeremy Bentham’s proposed “Chresto-
mathic” monitorial school — a variant on the panopticon — had a single master in
the middle surrounded by a circle of six monitors to keep order, then circular tiers
with seats for nine hundred boys.

Modem schools, colleges, and universities have greater spatial dif¬ferentiation and
far more complex plans. They provide multiple classrooms to allow different sorts
of instruction to proceed simul¬taneously; they add libraries, laboratories, art and
design studios, music practice rooms, and other specialized facilities; and they link
the pieces together with long cloisters or passageways (MIT’s “infinite corridor” is
emblematic). Residential institutions — like that planned by Thomas Jefferson at
the University of Virginia — integrate rooms for scholars and provide hierarchies of
informal and formal meeting places, so that the plan reads as an illustration of the
dedicated scholarly life. The demand that colleges and univer¬sities typically make
is to be “in residence” — to he part of the spatially defined community. And these
communities enforce, as well, strict compliance with academic timetables, class-
room sched¬ules, and calendars.

Of course there have always been alternatives to making such permanent, rigidly
organized places of learning. Pre-industrial socie¬ties had their itinerant teach-
ers and holy men who spread the word wherever they could find audiences. By
providing printed books and efficient mail service, the Industrial Revolution made
corre¬spondence schools possible. Two-way radio allowed a teacher in Alice Springs
to instruct children living on remote cattle stations scattered across the great Aus-
tralian outback. In the era of the Wilson government, broadcast television and vide-
otapes (in con-junction with reasonably good, old-fashioned mail service) created
the possibility of Britain’s Open University. Today digital telecom¬munication is pro-
ducing a powerful resurgence of this alternative tradition; being online may soon
become a more important mark of community membership than being in residence.
(When the Aga Khan gave MIT’s commencement address in 1994, he was not given
the traditional honorary degree to nuke him symbolically part of the community. but
rather a modem-equipped laptop com¬puter and an MIT e-mail address.)

As the digital telecommunications era dawned, sonic universities were very quick to
begin exploring the potential role of campus networks. At Dartmouth in the 1960s
— way back in the era of time-sharing mainframes — a network of interactive termi-
nals was put in place and heavily used.’” At MIT in the 1980s, with exten¬sive support
from IBM and Digital, the campus-wide Athena sys¬tem pioneered the educational
use of networked workstations with (by the standards of the time) high-bandwidth
interconnections.2. By the I990s campus networks were commonplace; even the
ivy-clad dorms in Harvard Yard had been hooked up.

At the same time (beginning in the 1970s), ARPANET, BITNET, and ultimately the
Internet began to shake up the traditional, insular structures of colleges and univer-
sities by creating quick, conven¬ient, inexpensive channels for worldwide, campus-
to-campus in¬terchange of text and data. These long-distance links were hooked
up to local networks, such as MlT’s Athena, which disseminated access around the
campuses themselves. Scholars quickly found that electronic contact with distant
correspondents could sometimes be
more rewarding than conversation with colleagues from Just down the hall. Online
conferences and bulletin boards began to challenge departmental common rooms
and local hangouts as the best places to pick up the latest on specialized topics. By
the 1991 Is many academics found that they simultaneously inhabited local schol-
arly communities, which provided their offices and paid their salaries, and virtual
communities, which supplied much of their intellectual nourishment and made in-
creasing demands on their time and loy¬alties. The tension was beginning to show.

Network connections quickly create new ways of sharing knowl¬edge and enact-
ing practices and so force changes in the characters of teaching spaces. At the
very least, a lecture theater now needs a computer workstation integrated with the
podium and a computer-connected video projector to supplement the old black-
boards and slide projectors: the podium is no longer a place for reading from a book
or lecturing from written notes, but a spot for directing and interpreting a stream of
bits. And instead of taking notes on paper, students use their laptop computers to
capture and annotate these bits.

Seminar rooms change too. They now need to be set up for videoconferencing as
well as for face-to-face discussions.” But that is just the beginning. Desktop-to-
desktop, switched video net-works open the more radical possibility of teaching in
virtual rather than traditional physical settings. Students might have office confer-
ences with faculty members without leaving their dormitory rooms. Seminars might
be conducted without seminar rooms. Symposia might virtually assemble speakers
from widely scattered locations. Lecturers might perform from distant places, and
without the need to concentrate students in auditoriums. School and university li-
braries become less like document ware-houses and dispensaries and more like
online information-brokering services. Reserve desks are supplanted by online doc-
ument collections, and slide libraries by huge image and video-on-demand servers.
Centralized reading rooms fragment into scattered infor¬mation access points: any
place where a student or faculty member may want to sit and work — an auditorium
seat, library carrel, desk, dorm room, or office — needs a laptop hookup point.

Even laboratories can sometimes be broken up and scattered — and benefit from
it. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro¬physics, form example, has devel-
oped an astronomical system called Micro-Observatory. The master units of this
system are networked computers in school classrooms. These are used to control
motor¬ized, digital-imaging telescopes mounted on rooftops and to view the tel-
escope images remotely. Image-processing software is used to subtract out the sky
so that observations can be made in the daytime. An extended version of this system
might incorporate hundreds of telescopes scattered around the world and allow
stu¬dents to make observations from anywhere there IS a network connection.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, the idea of a virtual campus — paralleling
or perhaps replacing the physical one — seems increasingly plausible. If a latter-
day Thomas Jefferson were to lay out an ideal educational community for the third
millennium, it might be sited in cyberspace.
“HOME AND NEIGHBOROODS”
Excerpts from: eTopia
By: Prof. William J. Mitchell

Local Attractions Rule

Live/work dwellings scattered everywhere is one imaginable conse¬quence of elec-

tronically reducing the need to locate in proximity to workplaces and services. The
iconoclastic urbanist Melvin Webber famously pointed out this possibility in the
I960s: “For the first time in history, it might be possible to locate on a mountain
top and maintain intimate, real-time and realistic contact with business or other
associates. All persons tapped into the global communications net would have ties
approximating those used today in a given met¬ropolitan region.” It is easy, from
this, to conjure up chilling visions of urban dissolution into endless, undifferentiated
suburbia. But why would you choose that particular mountain top? Presum¬ably be-
cause of its scenic beauty. If you’re not a hermit or a Kaczynski¬esque psychopath,
mightn’t you rather live at the bottom of the ski lift than the top of the mountain?
It only takes a moment’s reflection to see that locational freedom does not mean
locational indifference.

More precisely, the advantages (or disadvantages) of a particular residential site

are a compound of its local physical, economic, and cultural attractions together
with the costs—including time costs—of gaining access to related destinations and
necessary services. People make tradeoffs; they may choose to accept unattrac-
tive residential locations in the interest of accessibility to employment, or accept
additional travel times and costs as the price of attractive locations. So relying less
on immediate adjacency, and being able to maintain far-flung relationships more
effectively through efficient transporta¬tion and telecommunication simply mean
that local attractions and disadvantages loom larger relative to accessibility. If you
can locate anywhere, you will go where it’s nice, or where it is culturally stimu¬lating,
or perhaps where you get work done more effectively.

We can expect, then, that localities capable of one-upping others through their
pleasant climates, spectacular scenery, and attractive recreational opportunities
will attract not only holidaymakers but also a new class of permanent residents—
those who can work just about anywhere through electronic linkages, and who can
afford to buy into the best places. The Aspens, Tellurides, Malibus, Luganos, and
Tahitis of the world will tend to attract populations of high-end teleworkers in fields
such as finance, software design, and writing for the entertainment industry.

Cities and towns with unique architectural environments and cultural traditions
stand to benefit from the new locational freedom in similar fashion. The gorgeous
old city of Venice, for example, has been losing population because it has no room
for factories and office buildings (the nearest are across the lagoon in Mestre and
the tourist industry cannot generate sufficient economic opportunity to compen-
sate. But its characteristic and irreplaceable attractions remain, and it can integrate
modern telecommunications infrastructure far more gracefully than it could ever
have adapted to the demands of the industrial revolution, so it has an opportunity to
attract footloose teleworkers and recast its famous neighborhoods into a revitalized
twenty-first-century form. Many historic, treasured, but economically sidelined cit-
ies and neighborhoods—from Bath to Savannah—have similar potential.

When it all shakes out, the guiding real estate principle turns out to be this:
telecommunications networking can add great value to localities where relatively
well-off people would like to live. It can remove constraints that have prevented
them from doing so in the past. But it doesn’t do much for localities that have no
intrinsic attraction. Nor does it help people who find themselves trapped in margin-
alized, under-serviced areas and are too poor to move.

Renucleation

Since local scenic, social, and cultural attractions are distributed very unevenly in
space, there will still be settlements that nucleate around them. The electronic un-
raveling of traditional imperatives of adja¬cency may produce certain urban rear-
rangements—perhaps major ones—but it is very unlikely to result in random scat-
tering and gal-loping decentralization. We will continue to see a spatial division of
labor, within which different localities perform varying specialized roles according
to their comparative advantages. Things will still have their places. It will refmain
possible to describe neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations in terms of their
characteristic clusters of eco¬nomic activities.

Local attractions and related activity patterns are, of course, very often social
constructions—the outcomes of highly contingent his¬torical processes that have
concentrated people, institutions, wealth, physical infrastructure, and buildings at
particular locations. It can certainly be argued that they were not inevitable. But this
does not make them any less real, or necessarily any less durable. Places like Wall
Street, the City of London, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Silicon Valley will continue
to attract those who want to be where the action is, and who aspire to the status of
insiders. Indeed, the effect of decreasing reliance on adjacency may actu¬ally be
even greater centralization of particular activities on these sorts of locations. The
elites who control the global economy, and benefit most directly from it, will want to
cluster together at vibrant and attractive locations. Geographic dispersion of enter-
prises, and con¬centration of ownership, control, and profit appropriation, can turn
out to be opposite sides of the same coin.
Twenty-four-Hour Electronic Neighborhoods

One potential outcome of all this, where zoning and other policies allow it, is a clus-
tering of the new-style live/work dwelling in twenty-four-hour neighborhoods that
effectively combine local attractions with global connections. These—not isolated,
independent electronic cottages—will be the really interesting units in the twenty-
first-century urban fabric. And chances are they will take many different forms.

Some former bedroom suburbs will probably be able to take advantage of the fact
that they are no longer half-empty in the hours between the morning and evening
commutes, and will refocus them selves around newly viable local services such
as neighborhood schools, child and elderly day care centers, business centers, dry
cleaners, sports facilities and health clubs, and coffee shops and restaurants. Some
downtowns may succeed in remaining vital by attracting greater full time residential
populations together with the services that these demand, and will cease to empty
out after office working hours. (this may entail converting former office, warehouse,
and light industrial space to residential use). And some former recreational com-
munities at sites of scenic and cultural interest will be able to attract permanent
teleworker populations.

In an ironic turnabout, some residential colleges and universities will recognize that
their ancient patterns of live/work spaces clustered around communal facilities such
as laboratories and classrooms are not anachronisms, but appealing templates for
the future. These institutions will not fragment into scattered distance-education
enterprises, as some have suggested, but instead will differentiate themselves and
compete for the best talent by emphasizing intense face-to-face community in con-
genial surroundings, combined with efficient electronic linkages to a wider world.
These silicon towers will simultaneously be both more concentrated and more con-
nected than campuses of the recent past.

Redistributed Secondary Relationships

In all these cases, the social effect of restructuring living and working arrange-
ments is largely one of redistributing and relocating our secon¬dary social relation-
ships—those with people we regularly encounter. and whose names or faces we
know but with whom we are not so closely engaged as in our primary relationships.
This includes our rela¬tionships with our friends, daily acquaintances, co-workers,
and trades-people. In secondary relationships, as sociologists point out, we mostly
involve people in one or another of their particular roles, rather than interact con-
tinually with the whole person.

Pre-industrial towns and cities relied heavily upon structures of such relationships,
of course, and tended to concentrate them locally, within neighborhoods. In cities
of the industrial era they remained crucial as well, but they were scattered far more
widely throughout the urban fabric; the more mobile urban dwellers formed them
in the workplace and at points of contact with organizations and systems that were
important iii their daily routines. Furthermore, as many commentators have pointed
out, the very possibility of urban public life has depended on opportunities for ser-
endipitous formation of secondary relationships across socio-cultural boundaries.’
If you don’t have these, you’re living in an interest group or an institution, not a real
city.

In the emergent twenty-four-hour neighborhoods of the digital electronic era,

patterns will be transformed yet again, and the net effect will be complex. Some
secondary social relationships will sim¬ply be eliminated as electronic systems
replace bank tellers, retail clerks, and the like. But others will be regenerated at the
neighbor-hood level, as local life revitalizes; more of the people that you get to know
will be nearby residents. And others still will be formed and maintained at a dis-
tance through combinations of electronic interac¬tion and occasional face-to-face
meetings. We may find, then, that social integration through secondary relation-
ships occurs at both smaller and larger scales than those that have characterized
the indus¬trial era. And the opportunities and limitations will be generated by a mix
of tangible and electronic places and boundaries.

Revitalized Local Life vs. the Specter of the Dual City

The electronically enabled shift of activities back to the home, and the formation of
twenty-four-hour, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods that are rich in possibilities for
local secondary social relationships, poten¬tially produce the conditions for vigor-
ous local community life, for the formation of social and cultural capital in ways that
have seemed lost.

Under the most optimistic scenario, these new patterns will re-create what was
best about old-style small towns and urban neighbor¬hoods—the qualities that
were celebrated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
that have been so determinedly sought in neo-traditional vein by the New Urbanists,
and that have been pursued by sustainability-oriented modernists such as Richard
Rogers.” And they may sometimes succeed in generating hot spots of specialized
economic and cultural activity, as in the multimedia-oriented loft communities that
have grown up in New York’s Silicon Alley area and South of Market Street in San
Francisco.

Perhaps this is the best resolution of the increasingly strident debate between the
proponents of globalization and the defenders of local culture and regional iden-
tity: administrative and political units that can function both locally and globally.
But as localities adapt, with varying degrees of success, to the new conditions and
demands, there will be losers as well as winners. Much existing housing stock will
turn out to be ill suited to the integration of workspace. Low-income communities
may attract less investment in new telecommu¬nications infrastructure, and in any
case may lack populations with the education and motivation to take effective ad-
vantage of it. Many suburbs will prove difficult to adapt to twenty-four-hour life. And
many downtowns will lack the buzz needed to attract permanent residents. These
places will experience the downside of the digital revolution.

In particular, there is an obvious and serious danger that this reconfiguration of

urban patterns will further cluster the affluent while leaving the poor in places with
few good jobs and services. Today, for example, high-flying Silicon Valley profession-
als can com¬mute in their air-conditioned cars from gated residential communities
to campus workplaces with guards at the entries, scarcely noticing that they are
passing through marginalized, crime-ridden areas like East Palo Alto. When they do
notice, they probably lock their doors.

Urban areas could well continue to congeal into introverted, affluent, gated commu-
nities intermixed with “black holes” of disin¬vestment, neglect, and poverty—par-
ticularly if, as the unrestrained logic of the market seems to suggest, low-income
communities turn out to be the last to get digital telecommunications infrastructure
and the skills to use it effectively. As Manuel Castells has vividly warned, we could
end up with dual cities—urban systems that are “spatially and socially polarized
between high value-making groups and func¬tions on the one hand and devalued
social groups and downgraded spaces on the other hand.”’ Dwindling opportunities
for contact across the borders of more and more discrete units could certainly cause
public life to atrophy, and we could eventually face the explo¬sive combination of de-
cayed and derelict urban areas ringed by the territories of psychopathic survivalists
barricaded in their isolated electronic forts.

For planners and politicians, steering us away from the dual city is a matter of find-
ing policies that generate an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and
urban designers, the complementary task is to create urban fabric that provides
opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap rather than remain isolated
by dis¬tance or defended walls—the laptop at the piazza cafe table instead of the PC
in the gated condo.

And We Shall Build ... ?

Ultimately it comes down to a basic social and political choice. What will we use
the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory affordances of digital technology for?
Will we employ them—as seems possible—to help revitalize small-scale neighbor-
hoods and to strengthen inter-connections and social interactions?
Or will they become a means for the affluent elites to flee the problems of the cit-
ies and to create iso¬lated, privileged enclaves while leaving the less fortunate to
their fates? Though our options certainly are not unconstrained, the out-come isn’t
technologically predetermined. Nor is it categorically given by existing geographic
patterns and the legacies of history.

In creating their homes and neighborhoods, people will find ways to appropriate and
transform the technology in diverse fashions, just as they did with electric power
and with the telephone.’” As existing urban areas come to terms with the digital
revolution, and as new real estate developments respond to its demands, we are
likely to see both the upside and the downside scenarios played out, in different so-
cial and geographic contexts, within different public policy frame-works, and as the
result of varied entrepreneurial and design efforts.

Most importantly, this engagement will create opportunities for positive design and
policy intervention. You can make a difference, as resourceful and idealistic individu-
als have done in the face of past urban transformations.
“NOW AT DESIGN SCHOOLS, BIG CONCEPTS ON CAMPUS”
Excerpt from: The New York Times - September 26, 2005
By: Robin Pogrebin

On a recent afternoon at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, students were lounging

in front of the new architecture school building, smoking, drinking coffee, talking.
Sitting atop a low wall that rises on a diagonal angle on the building’s new brick
plinth, they seemed to revel in the communal space, a stone’s throw from their
drafting studios in the glass-enclosed building behind them.

Before the new building, the Higgins Hall Center Section, was recreated by the
architect Steven Holl, the students had been somewhat dispersed, crowded into
small 19th-century classrooms in the north and south wings of Higgins. Now they
have a large, funky space in the middle in which to study, chat about what they are
learning and collaborate on projects.”The open floor plan forces people to interact,”
said Keith Gratkowski, 27, a student who transferred to Pratt from Johnson College
in Scranton, Pa., this year. “So people stop and talk and see what people are working
on.” Pratt, whose new building was formally dedicated on Thursday, is not alone.

Amid growing student interest in their programs, New York architecture and design
schools are moving to add new buildings conceived by hot architects of the moment.
Aside from Mr. Holl’s glass-and-concrete center at Pratt’s School of Architecture, a
new main building by Lyn Rice is rising at Parsons School of Design in Greenwich
Village, and City College has thrown up construction tents around what is to become
its new architecture hall in Harlem, designed by Rafael Viñoly.

Next summer, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art will break
ground on a $105 million expansion of its art studios and engineering school
designed by the Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne.

In a sense, the schools are coming to realize that they, of all institutions, should be
embracing high-concept architecture for their campuses. We’re all seeing the same
thing - our students, our staff and our faculty are asking that we provide quality
facilities,” said Bob Kerrey, the president of New School University, which includes
Parsons. “They matter. They affect the decision to come, the decision to stay and the
quality of the work while you’re here.” “We’re trying to make design more central,”
he added. As if to embody that idea, all of these new projects feature an atrium
around which the rest of the school is organized - a kind of beating heart at the core.
Such common entrance areas are intended to foster an easy flow of communication
and physical movement. Students can see one another and be seen, crossing easily
between various parts of the building, generating a vibrant sense of activity.
Although a good deal of architecture study takes place in the classroom, much of it
occurs in the studio, where students create their drawings and models and observe
and comment on one another’s work. Architecture projects often involve collabora-
tions between teams who brainstorm on theory and form to arrive at innovative
designs.

In redesigning the new center section of Pratt’s Higgins Hall - a 19th-century build-
ing damaged by fire in 1996 - Mr. Holl linked it fluidly to the adjacent sections with
passages and ramps on each of its three stories. A new main entrance, basement
auditorium, digital resource center and lobby anchor the Higgins complex as a
whole.

“It’s like a breath of connective tissue,” Mr. Holl said of his design on a recent visit
to the hall, at 61 St. James Place. He framed a new public space in front of the
entrance, Mr. Holl said, because students “never had a place they could sit and meet
each other.” He also wanted the building to be something the architecture students
could learn from. To that end, and because of a limited $10.5 million budget, Mr.
Holl left the building’s concrete columns exposed, along with stone walls from the
original Higgins. “Because it’s an architecture school, the building can be a didactic
tool,” he said. “You can read the whole structure as you go.” “There is nothing hid-
den in this building,” he added. “There’s not one stitch of it that you can’t see - its
bones, its skin.”

Faculty members said they planned to invoke the design in their classroom teach-
ing. “It’s a learning space in terms of the way buildings go together,” said Caleb
Crawford, the assistant chairman of undergraduate architecture at Pratt.

The new Parsons building on Fifth Avenue at 13th Street includes a double-height
skylight-covered quadrangle composed of aluminum, glass and raw concrete
surrounded by galleries, meeting rooms, an archives center, lecture hall and new
design store. “It’s in effect a new front door to the school,” said Paul Goldberger,
the Parsons dean, formerly the architecture critic for The New York Times. “More
coherent, visible, conspicuous, exciting, usable.”

The project’s architect, Mr. Rice - formerly a principal at OpenOffice, which designed
the Dia Foundation’s Beacon galleries, illuminated by northern skylights - said he
was interested in giving Parsons greater “porosity.” His design features an open
lobby, large glass windows in which students can sit and easier circulation between
the school’s four connected buildings. A space in the corner for student critiques
would allow passersby a literal window onto the workings of the school. The school’s
two galleries will be upgraded to museum-quality standards, and the elevator banks’
exterior walls will be sheathed in students’ work - what Mr. Rice calls “pedagogical
billboards” - that will change throughout the year. A wall of electronic text is to be
designed by the media artist Ben Rubin.
The $13 million center, to be completed by 2007, is named for Sheila C. Johnson, a
New School trustee and co-founder of Black Entertainment Television, who donated
$7 million toward the project.

At City College, Mr. Viñoly’s $39 million redesign, scheduled to open in the fall of
2007, adds two floors of loft studio space, an architecture library, a central exhibition
space, offices and a lecture hall around a large atrium traversed by bridges.

In a similar spirit, students passing through Mr. Mayne’s new Cooper Union build-
ing pass through the common areas before reaching their labs and studios. Stairs
crisscross the void of the central atrium, connecting the
various lab and studio floors.

Reviewing the design last year in The Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote that, when
viewed through the building’s perforated metal screens, “the forms of passing
students will have an ephemeral, cinematic quality, creating a perpetual state of
motion within the building.”

Years ago, the design of art and design schools may not have mattered so much
because the city itself provided such a rich campus, Mr. Goldberger noted. But now,
“we need to offer students more,” he said. “Demand is so huge for design educa-
tion.”
“DESIGN EVOLUTION”
Excerpt from: The Yokohama Project
By: FOA (Foreign Office Architects)

“This is where amateurs have an advantage over pros. A pro knows what he can
deliver, and rarely goes beyond it. An amateur has no concept of his limitations and
generally goes beyond them.”
Trey Gunn, Road Diaries, Project Two. Discipline Global Mobile, 1998

Design Development

Architecture is not a plastic art, but the engineering of material life. Despite the
classifications, architec¬ture is a plastic problem only if you decide that plastic is
your material. But that is just a particular case of architecture. This is what we hope
distinguishes our work from other surface-complex architecture. We have grown
tired of the associations to Saarinen, Utzon or Gehry, but despite the formal simi-
larities, and our appreciation of their work, those comparisons are purely based
on the formal output. Formal con¬cerns are of significance, but this association
does not tell the whole story. What we hope characterises our work is fundamen-
tally the process of construction of the project, as our main priority is to produce
con¬sistency in the process of construction and material organisation. In fact, we
are interested in not having preconceived effects, but rather in exploring the materi-
als - and here we should understand material in the broadest sense - as a source of
ideas and effects. In many respects we actually feel closer to Mies than to the archi-
tects that we are often compared to in virtue of formal similarities: it is his attitude
of uncompro¬mising commitment to the organisation of matter, his exploitation of
contemporary construction technolo¬gies without formal prejudices, combined with
his capacity to obtain buildings of piercing beauty that inter¬est us, more than the
analogy of the formal results.

Processes are far more interesting than ideas. Ideas are linked to existing codes,
operating critically or in alignment with pre-existing systems of ideas. Rather than
making a project the implementation of an idea, or the scaffolding of an image, what
we are interested in is constructing, engineering processes on differ¬ent levels. A
process is the generation of a micro-history of a project, a kind of specific narrative
where the entity of the project forms a sequence. If geological, biological or hu-
man history, for instance, have some-thing to teach us, it is that these processes of
temporal formation produce organisations of a far higher complexity and sophisti-
cation than instantaneous ideas. This is perhaps the most important development
brought by information technology to our practice: we can design, synthesise and
proliferate specific histo¬ries, scripts for a project. Writing a project, introducing a
sequential development rather than deploying a form, an image. Proliferate, wait
for the emergence of the project. Writing code: Let’s see what happens IF: We are
no longer trapped in the traditional compulsion to reproduce historical models, or
to invent them from scratch. We do not have to produce a project as a reproduction,
a derivation, or as the invention of a historical model. We do not need to produce
complexity by making collages: we can synthesise the processes of generation as a
kind of accelerated motion, adding information integrally to the construction. This
sequential, integrative addition produces more ambiguous effects, more capable of
resonating on dif¬ferent levels than straightforward ideological statements, meta-
phors, allegories or reproductions.

Through our interests in the processes of construction and engineering of mate-

rial life, we get constantly involved with all sorts of technologies. And techniques
are always associated with performances, produc¬ing effects, delivering services.
Technique has become the domain of architectural services; but architec¬ture as a
service industry is a deadly business and it rarely delivers interesting architecture.
The concept of architectural services comes out of the coupling between architec-
tural technology and effect: a good professional is capable of using the right tech-
niques to produce the right effects. But what happens if we divorce technique from
service and effect? Is it possible to exploit the affective potential of architectural
technique? This is where we think there may be an alternative to an architecture
that masters effects; at least, a priori effects... There is an enormous potential to
be released, contained in the techniques of “architectural services”, that has not
been exploited in itself: project management, estimation, surveys, artificial intelli-
gence’s modelling capacity... None of this stuff has been able to be integrated in the
disci¬pline of architecture, and this is leading the profession to bankruptcy: there
are stars and there is archi¬tectural services... Complete schizophrenia. The real
challenge is to exploit the potential of these technol¬ogies beyond their utilitarian
association, to integrate them to a discipline that has not evolved for a long time.
Construct a new discipline out of them.

It has to do with the production of knowledge, and it requires a very deep personal
involvement from par¬ticipants. In the production of a project of this nature, there is
a very delicate balance against very power¬ful forces that threaten continuously to
stratify the work, to turn it into a conventional process. If one does not take care of
these forces, they may paralyse the project. If one is too obedient, they will destroy
it.

Greedy consultants, managers who measure the work in man hours and hours per
drawing, and people by years of experience, mediocre client representatives who
mistrust anybody under fifty, useless engineers who cannot imagine anything be-
yond their calculating ruler, “experienced” architects who feel they do not need to
learn anything any more, people with a hierarchical chip in their brain... Unfortu-
nately, one has to put up with some of this crap because sometimes the system
does not recognise even the most obvi¬ous things, like for example that the people
who are actually doing the jobs in every single office are under forty, and mostly
even under thirty. And they are the only ones able to do the job because they can
use computers, because they have access to technical means that have become
central to the production proc¬ess. And because they work as a research process,
producing knowledge as they are producing the project, rather than accumulating
“experience”.
2_ CONSTRUCTION & SYSTEMS
“CHANGING ARCHITECTURE”
Preface from Informal from Cecil Balmond
By: Charles Jenks

Whenever there is a revolution, or fast change, in architecture professional

barriers break down as specialists exchange roles. Architects become sculptors,
engineers become designers, artists turn into architects, and all these job descrip-
tions become fuzzy. This happened in the Early Renaissance, during the building of
the dome for Florence Cathedral, when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi switched profes-
sions from goldsmith to sculptor and artist to architect. It happened countless times
in the 19th and 20th centuries when the avant-garde was reconstituted again and
again. It happened with Eiffel and Tatlin, with Duchamp and Le Corbusier, and in-
deed it is one good measure of an avant-garde. If professionals do not give up their
job descriptions, their trade union, there is no avant-garde, no breaking of barriers,
no radical creativity.

The work of Cecil Balmond again proves this rule. Engineer, designer, architect,
thinker with numbers, speculative mathematician, writer: what is he if not all these
things. Why? Because he is part of the creative edge that is moving architecture.
Architectural movements, as the metaphor suggests, move the boundaries of
the discipline and they characteristically do this by challenging assumptions, the
conceptual framework behind the profession.

Of course Balmond does this coming from the profession of engineering, and the
unusual office that Ove Arup set up in London 55 years ago. This is an extended
organisational framework of collaboration, of teams of engineers with a certain flex-
ible autonomy and democracy. Rather than the old customary hierarchy, it is one
of the first examples of that type which has become prevalent today, the network
organisation. In terms of pay scales, responsibility and decision-making, it shares
more with Microsoft than the old Ford Motor Company, and the success of this
model confirms the original idea. New ideas, creativity and excellence in design
emerge when barriers are momentarily broken in order to be reformed in new con-
figurations.

If one asks what Balmond does in the inception of a building, then he is part design-
er, part catalyst, part the unseen hand behind the structure. Usually the engineer’s
role is highly visible, especially in big buildings. Think of Nervi’s stadia, or the work
of Santiago Calatrava today.

What are they if not powerful diagrams of structural forces, and organic metaphors
turned into emphatic form. The engineer often gets his identity, and pay, for making
architecture into giant structural expressionism. The High Tech movement did this
either with the exoskeleton, as in the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, or with the con-
struction joints, as in the famous ‘gerberettes’ of the Pompidou Centre - or with
both, as in Lloyd’s. Structural fetishism can be a beautiful thing, and all art fetishes
those parts of a work on which it focuses attention.

But this does not mean, as is often thought, that the designer-engineer always has
to express the structure of a building as if it were a crab or turtle. A good engineer
has to have a paradoxical skill, the ability to extend structural invention while, at
the same time, suppressing its expression for the sake of other architectural ideas.
Indeed, it was this more subtle ability that led to Cecil Balmond’s first important
collaboration, that with James Stirling on the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in
1977. Whereas a more repetitive, structuralist approach had been suggested by
the previous engineers working on the job, Balmond came up with a solution that
underscored the spatial idea and it was this innovation that Stirling used to make
Stuttgart such a masterpiece of urban drama.

Balmond, as the sketches show below, often is present at the creation of an archi-
tectural idea. His thinking thus has partly shaped the buildings of Rem Koolhaas
and Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza and Ben van Berkel, not to mention a host of good
mainstream architects such as Arata Isozaki and Philip Johnson. In 1997, when
I had to list the fifteen most important buildings and projects that were changing
architecture, I found to my amazement that Balmond scored higher than any archi-
tect on the list - that is, if one is to credit the engineer with partial creation.

And this raises the contentious issues of attribution, power and control. It is the rare
architect who, like Le Corbusier, depicts the collaboration of architect and engineer
as two interlocking hands, as a partnership between equals. Moreover, Cecil Bal-
mond, like the architects on my list, has a sophisticated idea of the new paradigm.
This is due, no doubt, to the fact that it is coming from the sciences of complexity,
and engineers have to be conversant with the sciences.

The new paradigm is, inevitably, characterised in different ways; as Complexity or

Nonlinear architecture, as Emergent or Cosmogenic architecture. None of these
terms would make you leave home, always the test of a good label. Computer de-
signers have called it Animate, Blob, Digital and Fractal architecture, or more simply
Cyberspace. Scientists themselves debate whether the new paradigm should go
under the label of Complexity or Chaos Theory, or Nonlinear Dynamics. Balmond
adds his special use of ‘informal’ to the lists, to the jousting of terms, to the Darwin-
ian competition of labels. Perhaps, because the new paradigm is so closely allied to
pluralism, this heterogeneity of usage is appropriate and a single winner will never
emerge.

Nevertheless, there is a broad coherent movement, a discernible, referent for these

terms. The way ‘informal’ illuminates the territory is in stressing patterns that
emerge from new assumptions. The customary way of conceiving a structure and
space is formal, that is through the Phileban solids (such as spheres and cubes)
and the grids that are based on them. From the beginnings of Chinese and Egyptian
architecture right up to the present, this formal system has dominated cities and
design.

While not rejecting this approach, the new paradigm puts it in its natural place as
part of a much greater whole. Formal patterns do underlie some of nature - spheri-
cal planets and hexagonal snowflakes, for example - but most of the cosmos shows
nonlinear organisation. Brain waves, heartbeats, or the growth of galaxies show
patterns that are fractal and dynamic. Through feedback slight variations, or sud-
den jumps, are introduced into organisational forms. The old paradigm was epito-
mised by the maxim ‘less is more’, the injunction of Flaubert and Mies van der Rohe,
whereas the new is characterised by ‘more is different’.

This is the phrase of the Nobel laureate and scientist Philip Anderson. It refers to
the ubiquitous property in nature of emergence, of phase change. Add more energy,
or information, or mass, or whatever, and a system will reach a critical point and
jump into a new regime. The basic insight, not much more than twenty years old,
is that under these conditions new patterns of organisation can emerge spontane-
ously. Cecil Balmond brings this new understanding to the collaboration of engineer
and architect. With Daniel Libeskind at the V&A in London he has worked out both a
new chaotic spiral organisation and a new system of tiling, the ‘fractiles’.

With Rem Koolhaas he has developed acentric cantilevers, and new roof structures.
He, like they, turns columns into beams and floors into walls and roof. The continu-
ous structural surface, the hybrid floor-ramp-wall, has become an identifying mark
of the new paradigm, as conventional as the glass and steel curtain wall was for
Modernism. Balmond has developed this with Dutch architects, but it is just one
more result of his nonlinear approach. He characterises this as thinking in terms of
surface not line, zones not points, scatter not equal support, and moving locus not
fixed centre. These are the hallmarks of his ‘informal’, a recognisable style tending
towards the biomorphic and free form. In this sense he is a leading part of that broad
movement in architecture whose most visible exponent is Frank Gehry.

On every design on which he has collaborated he has pushed the structure in dif-
ferent ways, or allowed new assumptions to interact, so that surprising patterns
emerge. Patterns are what underlie mathematics and our various conceptions of
beauty. The problem of old patterns, and particularly formal ones, is not that they
are ugly but unchallenging. We already know many of their combinations and, if we
are not fatigued by this knowledge neither are we stimulated by it. Aesthetic and
intellectual appreciation demands a minimum provocation, something that spurs us
to see and think anew. If the architect allows it, Balmond never leaves a structural
and spatial idea unchallenged, where he found it.
By convention, and even law, the engineer is not meant to receive equal credit for
the architecture, and Balmond is careful not to claim this. Often chief designers on
a building have their role passed over in silence and it is clearly time we devised
more accurate methods of assigning authorship than those that prevail today. But,
as a critic and historian, I have to say that in the long term Balmond’s contribution
will come out and he will be mentioned as an important force behind so much con-
temporary architecture of significance, and take his place with the Brunels, Eiffels
and Candela.
“ARCHITECTS’ PACE RAPIDLY BUILDS. DEVELOPERS HAVE ADDED INCENTIVE TO
GRAB TENANTS, AND BY DESIGNING BUILDING QUICKLY, THEY’LL LAND BUSI-
NESS - EVEN BEGIN CONSTRUCTION EARLY”
Excerpt from: The Chicago Tribune - January 22, 2006
By: Susan Diesenhouse

Uriel Schlair runs the “above ground” team. Jerry McElvain is in charge of the “be-
low ground” team.

They both work at the Chicago office of Gensler, a national architecture firm. But
they are designing major portions of a downtown office complex from opposing
directions at the same time. The goal: to speed up construction. Under pressure to
get buildings developed 15 to 30 percent faster than just a few years ago, architects
are dramatically changing how they work. They’re forming design teams that extend
beyond architects to engineers and developers so that decisions can be made in
minutes rather than days. They’re also speeding up the production of drawings and
plans for portions of buildings so construction can begin even before the design of
the entire building is completed.

In today’s weak office market, the developer who can offer an earlier occupancy date
may be the advantage to attract a major tenant who is still deciding between proper-
ties.The property owner may also see big savings if construction can beat out rapidly
escalating commodity prices. This year, the cost of building materials could increase
20 percent, said Jeffrey Gouveia, vice president of Boston-based Suffolk Construc-
tion Co., Inc. “Speed is everything, said George Efstathious, a partner at Chicago’s
Skidmore Owings & Merrill architecture firm, which is aiming to shave eight months
off development of an approximately $1 billion, 180-story residential tower, the Burj
Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. “The contractor has already built up to the 20th
floor even though we still have about three months of design work to do.”

Example 1: 108 N. State St. Chicago, Il.

To meet the tight design schedule for its portion of the approximately $300 million
first phase mixed-use complex slated for 108 N. State St., Gensler tried an approach
that is being adopted by more and more architectural firms. It broke the retail and
underground train station structures that it is designing into smaller pieces: the
foundation, parking, train station and four stories of retail below ground and the four
stories of retail above. The 400,000 square feet of retail must open by the first quar-
ter of 2008 to meet city goals and to serve those who will occupy the complex’s 17-
story office tower. That tower, being designed by Perkins+Will, must be planned with
the possibility that the developer, may add several stories if it signs up additional
tenants. Adding upper stories is in itself an unusual break from the past. Additions
to office buildings more often come in the form of a horizontal wing or a companion
tower--not extra floors above the base. “It’s not your everyday approach but makes
sense when land values are high,” the architect explained.

In the past, Gensler architects would have finished creating their portion of the
complex before any construction started, said Grant Uhlir, the Gensler partner in
charge of designing the glass-and-metal retail building and the underground transit
station. “Just a couple of years ago, it would have been design, bid, build,” he said.
Once the firm broke the project into smaller design components, it had to reconfig-
ure how its team approached the work. Last summer, Gensler’s architects cleared
out part of their office to set up a project workspace for themselves and their outside
consultants--a team of 45 people. And to streamline communications, the team
included structural, civil, mechanical and electrical engineers and representatives
of the contractor and owner.

“We can share knowledge and communicate instantly without waiting for return
calls or e-mails. That avoids mistakes down the road and there will be a time sav-
ing of maybe 15 percent,” Uhlir explained. Last week, for example, Uriel Schlair,
the “above ground” team coordinator, had questions about the Dearborn Street en-
trance. How big will it be? Will it interfere with city sewers or underground electric
vaults? “Because everyone I needed to talk to is right here we solved half the prob-
lems in one day rather than several,” Schlair said. “This is really complex; that’s why
I love it.”

Jerry McElvain, the “below ground” coordinator, expects to shave about 30 percent
off the time needed for his team’s assignment. “Today, one of the above ground
structural engineers wanted to lower a beam three feet but first he turned around
and asked me if that would work with my stairs and air ducts,” he said. “No missed
calls or e-mails or need to write back and ask, `What did you mean by this?’” Doing
more work at a faster clip also has improved Gensler’s finances. Nationwide, its 28
offices generated $311 million in revenues in 2005, said Uhlir. He declined to reveal
the firm’s profit margin, but industrywide they are usually about 10 percent. After the
economic slowdown in 2000, Gensler’s results declined, but with its new approach
to design, including the use of the latest technologies, company revenues are “back
in the ballpark” of where it had been in the heyday of the mid-1990s, Uhlir said.

In the last 12 months, the Gensler office here has added 62 people, bringing its
total to 163. Hailing from places like Germany, Serbia and Canada as well as the
U.S., some of the new people are a different breed. They are adept at both tradi-
tional architectural drawings, but also operate building information modeling soft-
ware, which is an automated three-dimensional illustrating tool that also crunches
numbers. Once an architect feeds project information into the database, a visual
image automatically pops up with dimensions and prices of structural elements
such as beams and windows. Since the images can be launched on a Web site,
members of the project team can all work together in real time, saving thousands
of work hours.

Example 2: 1 S. Dearborn St. Chicago, Il.

When a developer promises to deliver space to an important tenant in a yet-un-

built tower, architects can face even more intense pressure to work faster. In 2003,
Houston-based developer Hines Interests LP agreed to lease 500,000 square feet
in the tower, which was still a relatively rough concept on the computer screen, to
prominent Chicago law firm Sidley Austin LLP. But the attorneys needed to occupy
the building by November 2005.

That meant the architect, DeStefano + Partners, had to figure out how to cut 30
percent off its customary schedule to design the 40-story tower in eight months
rather than 12. “To get the account, we had to be very cost conscious; no changes
or re-engineering,” explained project manager Daniel Wagner. So DeStefano set up
a “war room” to monitor daily progress, and the project team gathered everyday at
4:30 p.m. Anyone with trouble reaching a goal, Wagner said, “could throw down a red
flag and say, `I need help.’ In my 20 years with Hines, this was the fastest project I’d
ever seen,” said Greg Van Schaack, manager of the developer’s Chicago office.

Project financing can also accelerate the architect’s already rapid pace. While
interest rates on construction loans are still relatively cheap, any rise can quickly
increase a project’s overall cost. “When you borrow $200 or $300 million, it’s a heavy
clock ticking even if you pay 6 percent rather than 8,” said Van Schaack. “We’re al-
ways at the mercy of interest rates.” That’s why it was critical that Sidley Austin start
to pay rent as quickly as possible.

Example 3: Northwestern University Medical Center

Sometimes designing a project in pieces also meets the occupant’s needs to

constantly update its technology or equipment.

A case in point is the $100 million downtown medical building at Northwestern Uni-
versity Medical Center. While the building has been under construction for about
two years, the interior is still being designed – for one reason: The building must ac-
commodate the latest medical equipment, explained architect John Syvertsen, chief
executive of OWP&P. “These projects take so long,” said Syvertsen, “and health care
technology can change so radically.”
3_ DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
“THE DREAM FACTORY”
FROM DESIGN TO DELIVERY, CUSTOM MANUFACTURING IS COMING SOON TO A
DESKTOP NEAR YOU
Excerpt from: Wired 12.11 & www.wired.com
By : Clive Thompson

If you could make anything you wanted, what would it be?

I’m staring at my own personal fabricator, it’s eMachineShop, an application that

produces a physical 3-D copy of almost anything I draw. The concept is simple: Boot
up your computer and design whatever object you can imagine, press a button to
send the CAD file to Jim Lewis’ headquarters in New Jersey, and a week later he’ll
send you the physical object. “Designing stuff used to be just for experts,” Lewis
says. “Now, we’re bringing it to the masses.”

I’m going to test that claim. I have no experience in design, so if I can manage to
engineer a product, then he’s right: Any idiot can do it. I launch eMachineShop’s
software and stare at the blank screen. What to make? Then it hits me: Ever since I
began playing electric guitar as a teen, I’ve wondered what it would be like to make
my own instrument.

I begin tentatively sketching shapes, using eMachineShop’s box drawing tool. Unfor-
tunately, boxy edges make for a rather ugly guitar, I poke around for another hour,
with equally ungainly results. Finally, I stumble upon a tool in the software that lets
me draw curves. In a flurry of creativity, I dash off a dozen concepts, stunned at how
easy it suddenly is. As I finish each concept, I click a button and up pops a lifelike
3-D view of my design. I spin it around to view it from all angles. I quickly discover
that amateur engineering gives me the same rush as playing a round of Halo. I even
lose track of time, obsessively tweaking and refining my guitars until I look up and
realize it’s way past midnight.

After a week of experimentation, I choose my favourite - a curvy, amoeba-like adap-

tation of a Flying V guitar. I had originally hoped to have it cut out of pine, but when I
explore the options for materials, I find that eMachineShop doesn’t stock wood thick
enough. The software offers me several possibilities, and each time I swap in a new
material, it re-prices the entire job, down to the penny. In the end, I opt to have a 3-D
milling machine carve my design out of a single block of clear acrylic. It will look
like something from a UFO, it will cost $880 and take about a week to make them.
At 02:00 on a Tuesday, I finally hit the “Place Order” button. My design shoots off to
Lewis’ farm of roboticized fabrication machines. - I’ve just printed a guitar.
MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld calls it the FAB revolution - every bit as important
as the invention of the personal computer, he says. Cyberspace and PCs made bits
flexible; fabrication technology is doing the same thing to atoms. Eventually, he
claims, you won’t even need a middleman like eMachineShop, because every house
will have its own personal fabricator.

Every house? That’s rather sci-fi. But Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits
and Atoms, makes a reasonably good case and has already taken an important step:
He has shrunk the personal fabricator down to a single room’s worth of off-the-
shelf tools, all of which are available right now. “You can make essentially anything,”
he tells me. Gershenfeld has developed a universal theory of fabrication, plus a
shopping list of what equipment you’ll need:

First, there are subtractive tools, devices that can cut through materials with com-
puter-guided, down-to-the-micron accuracy. A sign cutter works like a dot matrix
printer, except the head is a knife that can slice through thin sheets of materials
like vinyl or copper and is thus suitable for chopping out precision circuit board ele-
ments and bendable plastic. For thicker materials, a laser cutter is used, it uses a
35-watt carbon dioxide laser to slice through wood and acrylic as thick as an eighth
of an inch.

Though the cutters sound complex, they’re both guided by ordinary desktop drawing
programs like CorelDraw, so “you can learn them in about an hour,” Gershenfeld
says. “In a few seconds, you can transform a two-dimensional sheet of acrylic into a
three-dimensional folded object.” To produce even more-complex 3-D shapes, you
need a different sort of subtractive tool - something that can cut up entire chunks of
material. A CNC milling machine uses a computer-guided drill bit that can move in
three dimensions and can handle a range of materials - from foams and plastic to
metals - with excellent precision.

Then there are the “additive” tools, machines that fabricate from the ground up.
A vacuum-former can mold a quarter-inch-thick sheet of hot plastic around any
form, quickly producing surface shapes like. For closed forms an injection-molding
machine melts plastic pellets and squeezes them into a metal mold - perfect for
making things like cases for electronic devices. At the complex end of the scale are
3d printers which fuse plastic or plaster powder into thin sections over and over to
create a three dimensional form.

The final group of tools consists of circuits and chips to give your creation “intel-
ligence.” Microprocessors cost about a one dollar each, but are robust enough to
control sophisticated robotics and can be programmed using simple languages like
Python, Basic, and Logo. A sign cutter or milling machine can quickly produce cir-
cuit boards. Pop in the chips and you’re ready to go.
Using this line-up of machines, Gershenfeld has set up seven “FAB labs” in towns
around the world: from Boston’s South End, to India, and most recently Pretoria,
South Africa. After each lab opened, locals swarmed to fab a spectacular variety of
stuff.

“FAB is about making the things you can’t find at a shop,” he says. “It’s stuff for a
market of one.”
Still, can you really call FAB a democratizing technology when laser cutters cost
$15,000 and require special venting to remove the noxious fumes they generate
while hacking through plastic? Predictably perhaps, Gershenfeld invokes Moore’s
law. He maintains that in two decades - maybe even one - the marketplace will
produce a single, $1,000 device that sits on your desk and does everything one of his
FAB labs can.

FAB tools could produce new economic models for creators, soon we’ll be able to
build anything. But should we? Are we ready for a real world would look like the
Internet in 1996, when people started making their own Web sites.” “Remember
those hideous-looking psychedelic backgrounds and stupid animations? And blink-
ing tags?” “Rainbow dividers,”… It’s a good point - and it makes me anxious about
my guitar.

After a week of suspense, I visit the eMachineShop where my guitar body is ready.
Lewis offers to show me how the guitar was “fabbed”. The eMachineShop software,
he explains, operates like a “virtual machinist.” - it runs an emulation of the real-
world machines that fabricate parts, to determine whether the job is possible and
how much it’ll cost. As I watch, an onscreen animation of the spinning bit on a 3-D
milling machine approaches the guitar body slowly from the left side, pauses at
the edge, and begins to cut. Afterwards, Lewis points to the screen, where a timer
shows that the fabrication would take 44 minutes.

I wait in a conference room while Lewis fetches the guitar from storage. At first, I’m
amazed that the real thing even exists. The clear acrylic gleams like a brick, and the
brushed aluminium has precisely the sort of industrial flavor I’d hoped for. When I
lay the pickguard down on the body, every hole for the pickups and electronics is
precisely where I’d specified.

There’s only one problem. “It’s kind of heavy, isn’t it?”

By the time I get home, my excitement has worn off, and I begin to notice many other
design errors I’d made. I’d forgotten to round the corners on all sides of the guitar,
so the back part looks like a tabletop; I also neglected to taper the neck joint, so it’ll
jut out like a two-by-four into my arm while I play. Why didn’t I measure this stuff
more carefully?
I’m reminded about the dangers of designing solely on computers: When you’re
operating in a virtual realm, it’s hard to feel any consequences. It really is too much
like a videogame. You learn a lot from actually holding your materials in your hands,…
That’s when you have to grapple with your design.” The computer screen is forgiving;
the real world isn’t.

I push on and spend the weekend assembling the rest of the guitar. As the final
pieces come together, I find I’m getting excited again. For all its imperfections, my
creation looks surprisingly close to my original vision. When I attach the strap and
sling it around my neck, it has the heft of a weapon. Maybe this is the ultimate ap-
peal of the FAB revolution: When you create something from scratch, even the flaws
are charming – besides, I can always make Guitar V2.0. So I plug it in, turn on my
amp, and start to rock.
“FRANK GEHRY FOR THE REST OF US”
DESIGNED ON A DESKTOP, CUSTOM-CUT WITH A LASER, ASSEMBLED ON DE-
MAND. IT’S COMPUTER-DRIVEN CONSTRUCTION RAISED TO HIGH ART.
Excerpt from: Wired 12.11 & www.wired.com
By: Jessie Scanlon

The village of Greenport sits at the northern tip of the North Fork of Long Island,
a good three-hour drive from Manhattan. Once a bustling whaling port, Greenport
today is considerably quieter, with a part-time mayor and none of the social cachet
of the Hamptons. As the locals say, on the South Fork they call it sushi, on the North
Fork we call it bait

It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to find a notable project by one of New York’s
most promising young architecture firms, Sharples Holden Pasquarelli. As part of
its $13 million redevelopment of the town’s waterfront, SHoP, as the firm is known,
is building a camera obscura. Latin for “dark room,” the centuries-old invention is
essentially a viewing chamber that gives people inside a 360-degree panorama of
what’s happening outside.

But it’s not what the structure does or even how it looks that’s important. It’s the
way the camera is being built. The camera obscura is the first building to be 100
percent digitally designed and computer fabricated, SHoP’s partners say. Every
piece of wood, steel, and aluminum - 750 in total - is custom-made and completely
unique. When the parts arrive bubble-wrapped at the site, the construction crew
has only to fit them together. Weather permitting, the final bolt will be screwed in by
New Year’s. The firm has used this approach on parts of its other projects but never
for an entire structure. That makes the $185,000 camera a modest but important
showcase for the firm’s ambitious process, which begins with 3-D modeling soft-
ware and ends with construction workers assembling the laser-cut pieces into their
finished form.

If SHoP’s computer-driven architecture sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of

Frank Gehry, who pioneered the use of digital fabrication in the 1990s. The sculpted
titanium facade of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao - followed by the billowed
steel sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the incongruously
curved brick walls of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT - could not have been
built in any other way.

As part of the first generation of architects to go digital, Gehry used new tech-
nologies to make possible buildings so complex they previously existed only in the
imagination. He is fundamentally interested in form, and his swooping shapes often
force contractors to develop innovative construction techniques. That’s partly why
Gehry’s work is so exciting - and so pricey. “Using today’s tools, you could basi-
cally model any shape, press a button, print out the construction templates and say,
‘Build this,’” says Craig Schwitter, of Buro Happold, an engineering firm that has
collaborated with SHoP and Gehry. “That’s the model of working that makes things
expensive.”

SHoP adopts some of Gehry’s techniques, but to a different end: lowering costs. The
firm views digital tools as a way to streamline the design and engineering process,
minimizing labor hours and materials waste in order to make high-end, customized
architecture more affordable. “Gehry is shape-driven,” says SHoP partner Gregg
Pasquarelli. “We’re more process driven. We would never build an elaborate frame-
work to support a curve. We’d let the curve be determined by information from our
materials suppliers or by the parameters of the fabrication techniques.” SHoP can
seamlessly integrate such factors into its designs because, from the outset, it uses
many of the same 3-D software tools as its engineers and fabricators. The shape of
the zinc panels in one project were based on the standard size of the raw material,
so as to reduce unusable scraps. The serpentine walls in another took into account
the degree of curvature that could be easily fabricated.

“Rather than using the computer to generate form, SHoP uses the computer to
reconsider the entire process of building,” says Reed Kroloff, dean of the Tulane
School of Architecture and former editor of Architecture magazine.

Gehry starts his design process with wooden blocks and sketches. Next, his mod-
el makers translate the designs into cardboard prototypes. Eventually these are
imported into Catia, the high-end 3-D software Gehry borrowed from the aerospace
industry more than a decade ago - and which licenses for up to $15,000 a seat, plus
training costs. The end results are amazing but like haute couture, available only to
the deepest of pockets: The Stata Center came to $400 per square foot, $650 when
you include design costs. The industry average for design and construction of a new
science facility is $260 a square foot.

By contrast, SHoP begins its projects in the virtual realm, using Rhino - a more
modest 3-D program developed for Hollywood that sells for a sliver of Catia’s price,
less than $900 a seat - to rapidly make 20, 40, even 60 iterations of a building. Then
the architects judge each version against the requirements - light, room size, zon-
ing issues - for the particular project. From the outset, they aim to do more with
less. For one installation, SHoP used fluid dynamics modeling software to create an
undulating wooden “beach” from standard 2 x 2 cedar planks. For a museum now in
development, the firm is designing a facade whose decorative skin does double duty
as a load-bearing structure - a two-for-one approach.
When it comes to actual construction, SHoP reduces hard-hat hours by replacing
onsite measuring and sawing with computer-controlled fabrication. And time is
money - labor costs can eat up to 80 percent of a budget. The camera obscura’s
wooden formwork was milled in a single morning in Brooklyn; the steel was sliced
by a plasma laser over two days in Commack, Long Island, and partially assembled
upstate. Once the pieces arrive in Greenport, they’ll be fitted together in about six
weeks.

SHoP also saves money by keeping in house some jobs typically handled by
specialists or consultants. For the Porter House, a condominium tower in Man-
hattan’s Meatpacking district, the architects built a six-floor addition clad in zinc
panels and light boxes atop a 1905 brick warehouse. Most architects would have
hired an expert like the Permasteelisa Group, the go-to company for Gehry, I. M.
Pei, and Norman Foster, to build the facade. Instead, SHoP worked directly with
the engineers, fabricators, and general contractor to design and install the wall for
an estimated 20 percent less than a specialist would have charged. In the end, the
Porter House was constructed for 10 percent less than the average $225 per square
foot of prime New York residential real estate.

For clients, the advantages are obvious.

“It means you don’t have to be the Disney Concert Hall to be able to afford great
architecture,” says Buro Happold’s Schwitter.

In taking on the details usually left to others, SHoP has broken one of its profession’s
big taboos. Architects usually avoid the specifics of construction in order to sidestep
liability for faulty results. In contrast, SHoP has taken an equity stake in four projects
- and the legal accountability that comes with it. “If we want to push the profession
to try new methods,” explains Pasquarelli, “we have to be willing to take responsibil-
ity for the risk of what we were proposing.”

From the beginning, SHoP aimed to be a different kind of architecture firm. Found-
ed in 1996 by five recent grads of Columbia’s School of Architecture, SHoP gained
visibility quickly. Its Rector Street Pedestrian Bridge was the first construction at
Ground Zero after September 11. This year, SHoP completed a first-class lounge for
Virgin Atlantic at JFK Airport. And in May, the firm was chosen, along with British
architect Richard Rogers, to create the master plan for a $500 million redevelop-
ment of Manhattan’s East River waterfront, a 2-mile swath between Battery Park
and the Lower East Side. It was SHoP’s work in Greenport that convinced Vishaan
Chakrabarti, director of the Manhattan office of the city planning department, that
the firm could balance a complex project with a public-works budget.
“SHoP gets into the nitty-gritty of construction,” says Chakrabarti. “They understand
it and figure out ways to build beautiful structures that aren’t exorbitant.”

Last January, SHoP moved from a 37th Street office, so far east it might as well
have been in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to a penthouse suite on Park Place. The
space is already crowded with staff, which at 30 heads has doubled in the past two
years. From the roof of the new office, the young partners look out on a century of
architecture. They see the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall. The Woolworth Building,
once the tallest in the world, stands across the street. A few blocks west lies Ground
Zero, where a new icon of the New York skyline will someday rise. To the east, Gehry
and Santiago Calatrava have residential towers on the drawing board. And SHoP’s
own vision of cheaper, smarter, better architecture will shape the waterfront to the
south.

“Before that can happen, we have to break down the conventions of the profession,”
admits Pasquarelli. And rebuild it, piece by laser-cut piece.

Contributing editor Jessie Scanlon (jessie@wiredmag.com) wrote about designer Is-

sey Miyake in issue 12.04.
“DIGITAL FABRICATION: FROM DIGITAL TO MATERIAL”
Excerpt from: Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing
By: Branko Kolarevic

NOTE: This paper consists of edited excerpts from chapters by the author published
in Branko Kolarevic (ed.), Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing,
London, UK: Spon Press, 2003.

Historically, architects drew what they could build, and built what they could draw,
as William Mitchell observed. The straight lines and circular arcs drawn on paper
using straightedge and compass have been translated into the materials made by
the extrusion and rolling machinery. This reciprocity between the means of repre-
sentation and production has not disappeared entirely in the digital age.

In the realm of representation, the modeling software based on NURBS has infi-
nitely expanded what could be “drawn,” while the digital fabrication technologies
have substantially expanded what could be manufactured and built. As a result, the
geometric complexity of buildings has increased dramatically over the past dec-
ade. Furthermore, the digital age enabled a direct digital link between what can be
represented and what can be built through “file-to-factory” processes of computer
numerically controlled (CNC) fabrication.

There is an unprecedented directness with which digital design information can be

used in the construction of buildings. The consequence is that architects are be-
coming much more directly involved in the fabrication, as they can efficiently create
the information that is translated directly into the control data that drives the digital
fabrication equipment. A growing number of successfully completed projects, which
vary considerably in size and budgets, demonstrate that digital fabrication can offer
productive opportunities within schedule and budget frameworks that need not be
extraordinary.

Various fabrication technologies exist today, which could be broadly grouped as CNC
cutting, subtractive, additive, and formative. CNC cutting, or two-dimensional fab-
rication, is the oldest and the most commonly used fabrication technique, involv-
ing simple two-axis motion of the cutting head relative to the sheet material. Cut-
ting technologies, based on superheated gases (plasma-arc), laser light and highly
pressurized stream of water (water-jet), are broadly available and have been used
extensively on a number of recently completed projects worldwide.

In CNC milling (subtractive fabrication), machines remove material volumetrically,

by adding the ability to move the drill-bit along the third, Z axis. Large architectural
firms, such as SOM’s office in Chicago, have used CNC milling machines in 1980s
in the production of architectural models and studies of construction assemblies.
The CNC milling has recently been applied in new ways in the building industry – to
produce the formwork (molds) for the off-site and on-site casting of concrete ele-
ments with complex geometry.

In one of the office buildings (Zollhof Towers) in Düsseldorf, Germany (2000), de-
signed by Frank Gehry, the undulating forms of external wall panels, made of rein-
forced concrete, were produced using blocks of lightweight polystyrene (Styrofoam)
that were shaped in CATIA and were CNC milled to produce 355 different curved
moldsthat became the forms for the casting of the concrete. CNC milling can be
also used to produce doubly curved molds for the shaping of glass panels with com-
plex geometry, as in Gehry’s Condé Nast Cafeteria project in New York (2000) or
Bernard Franken’s “Bubble” BMW pavilion (1999).

In a process converse of milling, additive fabrication involves incremental forming by

adding material in a layer-by-layer fashion. It is often referred to as layered manu-
facturing, solid freeform fabrication, rapid prototyping, or desktop manufacturing.
Because of the limited size of the objects that could be produced, costly equipment
and lengthy production times, the additive fabrication processes have a rather lim-
ited application in building design and production. In design, they are used mainly
for the fabrication of study models. In construction, they are used to produce com-
ponents in series, such as steel elements in light truss structures, by creating pat-
terns that are then used in investment casting.

In formative fabrication, mechanical forces, restricting forms, heat or steam are

applied to a material so as to form it into the desired shape through reshaping or
deformation, which can be axially or surface constrained. For example, plane curves
can be fabricated by the CNC bending of rods, tubes or strips of elastic material, as
was done in several pavilions designed by Bernhard Franken for BMW.

After the components are digitally fabricated, their assembly on site can be aug-
mented with digital technologies. Digital three-dimensional models can be used to
precisely determine the location of each component, move each component to its
location and, finally, fix each component in its proper place. Components can be bar
coded and the bar codes can be then swiped on site to reveal the location of each
component by displaying them within the 3D digital model of the building. Electronic
surveying and laser positioning equipment, driven by the 3D digital data, can be then
used to precisely determine the position of each component.

The digital design information can be used directly in fabrication and construction to
drive the computer-controlled machinery, making the time-consuming production
of drawings unnecessary. This newfound ability to generate construction informa-
tion directly from design information is what defines the most profound aspect of
contemporary architecture.
The close relationship that once existed between architecture and construction
(what was once the very nature of architectural practice) could potentially reemerge
as an unintended but fortunate outcome of the new digital processes of production.

The digital generation of information to manufacture and construct buildings can

render the present inefficient hierarchies of intermediation unnecessary. By using
digital building information models, the processes of describing and constructing a
design can be now more direct and more complex because the information can be
extracted, exchanged and utilized with far greater facility and speed; in short, with
the use of digital technologies, the design information is the construction informa-
tion. It is this digitally-based convergence of representation and production proc-
esses that represents the most important opportunity for a profound transformation
of architecture as a profession and, by extension, of the entire building industry.

By integrating design, analysis, manufacture, and the assembly of buildings around

digital technologies, architects, engineers and builders have an opportunity to fun-
damentally redefine the relationships between conception and production. The cur-
rently separate professional realms of architecture, engineering, and construction
can be integrated into a relatively seamless digital collaborative enterprise -a digital
praxis.
source book
OFFICIAL REFERENCIES

Region

- Plan d’affectation cantonal (PAC) no 229, Etat de Vaud, 1992

- Règlement communal sur le Plan d’Affectation (RFA) de la commune de Cha-
vannes, 1986-88
- Schéma directeur de l’Ouest lausannois, 18.12.2003

Design Phases

-The Architect’s Job Book, Sixth edition 1995, RIBA Publications, London, 1995
Exerpts from The architect’s Job Book, pp 94, Riba publication, London, 1995
source book
BIBLIOGRAPHY

1_ Architecture

William J. Mitchell, City of bits, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000

William J. Mitchell, E-topia, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999
P. Morrison and the Eames‘ office, Powers of Ten, Paperback , 1994
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization,
Paperback, 1996
Vitruvius, Ten books on architecture, Dover publications, New York, 1995

2_ Construction & Systems

Cecil Balmond, Informal, Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2002

Heino Engel, Structure Systems, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Darmstadt, 1997
FOA, The Yokohama project, Actar Publisher, Barcelone, 2002
Peter Pearce, Structure in nature is a strategy for design, MIT Press, Cambridge,
1990

3_ Digital technology

Architectural Design Vol. 72 No 5 Sept/Oct 2002, Versioning: evolutionary techniques

in architecture
Beesley Cheng Williamson, Fabrication: examining the digital practice of architec-
ture, Coach House Press, Toronto, 2004
Branko Kolarevic, Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing, Spon
Press, New York, 2003
Neil Gershenfeld, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal
Computers to Personal Fabrication,
source book
WEB LINKS

Web links

LAPA main page:

http://lapa.epfl.ch/

Prof. William J. Mitchell

http://web.media.mit.edu/~wjm/

MIT Media LAB

http://www.media.mit.edu/

eMachineShop
http://www.emachineshop.com/

ETHZ Digitalwerkstatt
http://www.hbt.arch.ethz.ch/infrastructure/digitalwerkstatt

Société suisse des Ingénieurs et des Architectes (SIA):

http://www.sia.ch

The American Institute of Architects (AIA):

http://www.aia.org

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA):

http://www.riba.com