Creative Architecture Machines
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.
Associate Professor, Architecture
California College of the Arts
Jason Kelly Johnson is a founding design partner of Future Cities Lab, an experimental design and research office based in San Francisco and Athens, Greece. Working in collaboration with his partner Nataly Gattegno, Johnson has produced a range of award-winning projects exploring the intersections of design with advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, responsive building systems, and public space.
Johnson’s work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Most recently he was awarded the 2011 Architectural League of New York Young Architects Prize, the 2008–09 Oberdick Fellowship at the University of Michigan TCAUP, and the 2009 New York Prize Fellowship at the Van Alen Institute. He currently teaches at the California College of the Arts. His design work has been awarded an Unbuilt Architecture Award from the Boston AIA and an ACSA Faculty Design award in 2010.
Associate Professor, Critical Studies
California College of the Arts
Michael Shiloh is an associate professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA), where he teaches electronics, programming, robotics, and mechatronics. Trained formally as an electrical engineer, Shiloh worked for various consumer and embedded engineering firms before discovering his passion for teaching.
Shiloh has collaborated with Survival Research Labs since 1995, assisting in designing, building, and repairing very large art machines and participating in over fifteen shows worldwide. He is very involved in the Maker community both at CCA and in the world at large. He is particularly interested in Maker culture, how it self-identifies, and how it includes and excludes others. In 2013 Shiloh started working for Arduino, speaking about and teaching the open-source electronics prototyping platform to new audiences. In 2014 he co-authored the third edition of Getting Started with Arduino, with Massimo Banzi, one of the founders of Arduino.
