Module 5:  Printing Architecture 

New materials and fabrication methods have historically led to radical changes in architectural design. They have indeed been the primary drivers in its evolution. The introduction of new methods and materials is usually followed by phases of intense experimentation, during which architects explore the new potentials – often without preconceptions – and try to determine how these can best be applied.

On both the computational design and the fabrication side, parallel concepts have evolved based on the idea of particle elements or voxels. Nearly endless abstract geometrical elements can now be computationally composed to form the architecture of entire buildings. Countless particles of material can now be solidi!ed by 3D printers into massive building components. Numerical material and physical material are merging into one. The !eld of architectural synthesis is open.

The potential implications for architectural design are extraordinary. First, as there is potentially a WYSIWYG correspondence between design and fabrication, it is no longer necessary to produce two-dimensional plans, details or construction drawings. Design never enters a 2D space, nor does it need to originate there. Second, there can be unlimited dierentiation within and element, and unlimited inidividuality between elements. Uniformization is not imperative as there are little economies of scale to be gained. Finally, there is no longer a cost for complexity – neither in terms of time nor in terms of material.

In this module students explored these new technologies through the design of a villa situated at the Blatterwiese at Zürichhorn. Selected design excerpts will be printed at a 1:1 scale. Final presentations of each design are presented below.

Maria Smigielska: How to achieve spatial qualities from flat plans ?

Joel Letkemann: Asterion III: The Lake House

Jessica In: The Four Dimensional Nightmare
An ill-tempered Architecture.
In the J.G. Ballard short story The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, architecture is now PsychoTropic, capable of responding to the moods and reactions of its inhabitants. The main character moves into a PT house previously inhabited by a film star who murders her architect husband. Having absorbed the echoes of previous tenants, the house begins to turn against its new owners, who must deal with the consequences of an emotional house.
If a building is capable of emotion, and of physically expressing this emotion, what kind of characteristics would it exhibit? Do the different parts of the building exhibit different emotions? Is a column melancholy? Can a slab be violent? Is there such thing as a happy staircase? How can such emotions be described through architectural form, and in turn, evoke response from inhabitants?

Achilleas Xydis:

Demetris Shammas: VI1:1A  
Villa 1:1 is an experiment on the creation of spatial artifacts by the use of sound.
Abstract elements are designed to be momentarily substantiated by the resonance.
Villa 1:1 articulates the notion of a villa, an any villa, functionally non-predetermined and implicitly changing; a four-dimensional schema were one after the other, rooms appear through nothingness and disintegrate into nothingness. The focus is not the production of a rigid architectural piece, but rather ‘the unfinished’, an act that envisages an architecture in its primordial stage. Sedated, dreamy, crude but surprisingly sensual, the villa is a place of all possibilities, an unsettled shape which expresses a moment yet alludes to all other possible moments. Complex and heterogeneous but at the same time empty, a space of nothingness where everything is.

Nicholas Miranda: Untitled

David Schildberger: body and cliché