Digital Fabrication in Interior Design

Body, Object, Enclosure

Jonathon Anderson, Lois Weinthal, Jonathon Anderson, Lois Weinthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Diseño de interiores

Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure draws together emerging topics of making that span primary forms of craftsmanship to digital fabrication in order to theoretically and practically analyze the innovative and interdisciplinary relationship between digital fabrication technology and interior design. The history of making in interior design is aligned with traditional crafts, but a parallel discourse with digital fabrication has yet to be made evident.

This book repositions the praxis of experimental prototyping and integrated technology to show how the use of digital fabrication is inherent to the interior scales of body, objects and enclosure. These three scales act as a central theme to frame contributions that reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of interior design and reinterpret traditional crafts by integrating new methods of making into conventional workflows. Featuring significant international practitioners and researchers, the selected contributions represent the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of design, demonstrating a breadth of disciplines.

A foundational text for interiors students and practitioners, Digital Fabrication in Interior Design expands the necessary dialogue about digital fabrication at the scale of interiors to inform design theory and practice.

OBJECT

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025931-7

5 An Architectural Romance between Subject and Object

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025931-8

Brandon Clifford

Architecture suffers from a clear brand. Because of this clarity, it is commonly understood that architects design buildings. So, a dependent definition emerges. It cannot be architecture, without a building. This definition bounds a discipline by the product it produces, but in doing so, it reveals two deep wrinkles. First, the majority of buildings are not realized by architects (Rudofsky, 1964). Second, ‘architects do not make buildings; they make drawings of buildings’ (Evans, 1989, 369). While the former does little to shore up architect’s claims to buildings, the latter offers a bit of clarity in understanding that architects are a subset of design, dedicated to producing drawings that serve as instructions for others to make buildings. Unfortunately, it discounts architects that orchestrate buildings without drawings. There are those master makers such as Antoni Gaudí, Sigurd Lewerentz and Félix Candela, or the master masons of the gothic era that prioritize materials and construction over scale representations of architectural intent. Despite its clear branding, the elusive disciplinary definition is becoming more and more complex! To make matters worse, it’s not clear what is and is not a ‘building’.

Whether it be Laugier’s (Laugier, 1755) retrojection that architecture was founded on a need for shelter, or modernist efforts to hermetically seal architecture at the ‘enclosure’¹, these prevailing positions on architecture classify it within a utility. These positions, when taken dogmatically, do more to exclude than they do to define. In the process, a number of casualties emerge. The Pantheon for example, suffers from a massive hole in its roof – not architecture? These utilitarian definitions dominate the default positions on architecture, but there are alternative models that enrich the discussion.

Sigfried Giedion (Giedion, 1971) offers a way of thinking about architecture that isn’t tied to a finite definition, but a flux between three space conceptions – objects that radiate space around them, enclosed rooms, and a hybrid. Giedion falls into his own version of a retrojection by attempting to categorize these three types to explain an architectural evolution.

He relies on prevailing theories of the time proposed by Alois Riegl (Riegl, 1985/1901, 27) and Wilhelm Worringer (Worringer, 1953) that suggest early civilizations, such as the Egyptians, constructed dense objects like pyramids and obelisks due to a ‘fear of open space’ (Worringer, 1953, 15). Aside from that problematic assumption, what is most compelling about this proposal is that these three modes are less categories to distinguish between, but moments that constitute phase changes and transitions between them. Architects invest tremendous amounts of energy trying to define what is and what is not architecture. While no one else is asking this question, these efforts to classify, rarify and define the discipline of architecture are often projected onto others instead of reflecting the architect’s own position within a foggy field. The following chapter chronicles one researcher’s quest for a more fundamental understanding of an architecture. Spoiler alert, there is none.

Let me temporarily shift to the first person because these experiments should also be understood as an attempt to reconcile my own interest in sculpture and product design with having stumbled into the profession of architecture. The reference to ‘I’ represents my own thoughts, reflections and point of view; however ‘we’ refers to the team, the partners and the collaborators that make these projects real. I myself have been interrogating the discipline of architecture by testing its foundations; which, in turn, happily share endless properties with adjacent disciplines. I’m abandoning utilitarian definitions in favor of procedural relationships. I’m rejecting the premise that architecture encloses space for specified functions. I’m denying any definition that claims architecture does anything exclusively. What I’m embracing is a range of approaches; that, in their totality, might offer a definition of my own contribution to architecture. With the slate cleared, we can start to exercise three distinctly different approaches to the ultimate destination, which is to craft a relationship between inorganic matter and the human body.

The following dissects a series of speculative built projects that test alternative perspectives on what defines architecture – object, enclosure and body. By circulating through these various mindsets, some unconventional allies emerge – deceit and deception.

OBJECT

The object mindset abandons the idea that architecture encloses space and situates architecture as an object that radiates space around it. It adopts the Egyptian obelisk as a place maker, the hearth as a gravitational force, and the nebulous relationship between humans and objects as the primary question at stake.

Periscope Foam Tower (Figure 5.1]) is designed to signify an event in Atlanta Georgia. At 60 feet tall, it is positioned on a ridge that runs parallel to the primary growth ridge in Atlanta – Peachtree Street. Periscope reaches above the urban context, shored up by this geological formation, making it visible from across the city. It serves as a beacon, first experienced from a vast distance, where the tower appears as if it is fabric being stretched vertically in an apparently impossible manner. Upon closer approach, the tower maintains a memory of classical orders – with a base, bundled shaft and a capital. The proportions of which hold a curious relationship to the proportions of the human body. Upon closer inspection, the tower is not stretched fabric. It is composed of solid volumetric foam that is tethered down to its own base. In this mindset, the architecture takes advantage of the temporal approach that the human takes towards an inanimate object. While the object remains unchanged, the perception of this object inverts, thus revealing a discovery for the participant.

5.1Periscope Foam Tower. Courtesy of Matter Design

Helix (Figure 5.2) operates in a similar manner, but isn’t able to capitalize on distance in the same way as Periscope. Helix presents itself as a concrete spiral staircase in a gallery space. This undeniably recognizable form immediately situates the object as a utilitarian element and yet the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The surrounding context gradually offers hints that reveal Helix’s naughty posturing. First, Helix is adjacent to an actual stair, raising a question about necessity. Its adjacency also reveals that Helix is half-scale, unable to allow humans to occupy it, rendering it useless. As the visitor approaches the stair, they touch the assembly and it sways away from them. Helix appears as a compression-only concrete stair resting on the ground, but it is suspended from the ceiling, floating in the space as a pendulum. The choreography of these revelations constitutes the generation of this project.

To be clear, no one asked for an inadequately redundant stair to be set adjacent to a perfectly functioning stair, but this adjacency serves as the backstop for this revelation. In this mindset, the revelation is the architecture, not the concrete stair. In exercising this utilitarian costume, an interesting result emerged. Helix, more than any other project, is continually confused for an architectural product instead of the rhetorical experiment it is intended as. We are regularly approached by potential clients, often building out loft spaces in SOHO, asking how to purchase Helix. This understandable confusion is the result of experiencing Helix through photography instead of in person.

A unique phenomenon occurs when entering incredibly dark spaces, forms and figures emerge slowly from the darkness. The darkness constructs a lag in reception as the human eye adjusts to its new conditions. That lag could be seen as unproductive, or it could be seen as experience. That experience could not be recreated by pulling back a curtain to reveal an object. The magic of tenebrosity is in slowly becoming aware of something that was always present. The question being raised in the object mindset is how to reveal a transformation, without transforming the object itself. These objects transform exclusively through a temporal shift in perception. These indignant experiments in architectural thought appear to resist conventional notions of what constitutes architecture, but, in their mischievous performances, they are dedicated to producing an experience of inverting

5.2Helix. Courtesy of Matter Design

perception for the people that engage them. They obfuscate reality by posturing in opposition to their primary reading. In this model, architecture resides in a continual rediscovery of an object through time. The opposing approach will be explored in the ‘body’ section.

While I find this shift away from the object and to the experiential byproduct of the object to be productive, it brings into focus the finite conclusion of the revelation. Once you realize the stair is redundant and rhetorical, that revelation will not be continually powerful. It is a one-time experience, and therefore crafted around an introduction, experience and conclusion. This raised a question in this research trajectory about the benefits of bracketing experiences versus crafting cyclical, looping or recursive revelations. These various approaches are also explored in the ‘body’ section.

ENCLOSURE

5.3Round Room. Courtesy of Matter Design

While the object mindset positions architecture as a node that radiates space around it, enclosure adapts the more prevalent mindset that architecture envelops the body. The experiments in this phase invert the subject–object relationship, but they maintain lessons learned regarding perception and reveal. While the idea that architecture as enclosure is quite conventional, these experiments find their friction through testing the limits of size and dimension by tailoring material to the body. This approach to architecture is not interested in offering gene...