Since the late 1990’s architects have typically used commercial CAD software to feed CAM programs to feed CNC machines. These “computer-aided” processes and “numerically-controlled” machines are most often used to increase efficiency and make the design, prototyping and fabrication processes more routine, faster and cheaper. In architecture and design schools around the world students are increasingly being taught to use standard suites of software and industrial hardware technologies such as laser cutters, robotic mills and 3d printers as ways to precisely model the formal and geometric aspects of their designs. Yet these fabrication technologies are rarely interrogated or explored in a critical or creative fashion. Why is it that architects are taught to be mere users of technology rather than innovators? Why are the core creative tools of our profession designed by systems engineers? What creative potential exists at the heart of these machines, where bits intermix with atoms, where digital code meets material logic?

This studio will embrace a more radical approach to the design and fabrication of architecture. The main ambition of the studio is to explore the efficacy of digital processes and their potential to contribute to a wider conversation about architecture, technology and culture. Through the production of experimental and speculative fabrication machines we will endeavor to contribute to a wider debate within architecture about the role architects might play in a coming world where the lines between the digital and the physical are rapidly being blurred beyond recognition.

About engaging a scientist:
Increasingly students enrolled in the CAM studio are interested in pushing the boundaries of material science in their custom 3d printing and novel fabrication research. This includes research into both common and novel materials such as nanomaterials, biomaterials, conductive and metal alloys, ceramics, composites, polymers and other phase change materials.While we have good support in the areas of software, hardware and fabrication, we are interested in engaging a material scientist to help students develop innovative materials research, protocols for simulation, prototyping techniques, iterative testing and validation methodologies.