Toward Discrete Architecture: Automation takes Command

Abstract

This paper describes a framework for discrete computational design and fabrication in the context of automation. Whereas digital design and fabrication are technical notions, automation immediately has societal and political repercussions. Automation relates to industrialization and mechanisation-allowing to historically reconnect the digital while bypassing the post-modern, deconstructivist, or parametric decades. Using a series of built prototypes making use of timber, this paper will describe how the combined technologies of automation and discreteness enable both technical efficiencies and new architectural interest. Both projects are based on timber sheet materials, cut and folded into larger elements that are then assembled into functional structures. Both projects are also fragments of larger housing blocks. Discrete building blocks are presented from a technical perspective as occupying a space in between programmable matter and modular prefabrication. Timber is identified as an ideal material for automated discrete construction. From an architectural perspective, the paper discusses the implications of an architecture based on parts that remain autonomous from the whole.