Inventory

Abstract

With commands like “extrude,” “trim,” “revolve,” and “array,” contemporary CAD software contains analogues to the machine processes and abundances of industrial mass-production. This produces in the designer an affinity towards the predictable surface of standardized building materials. Furthermore, by instantiating geometries—that appear seemingly out of nowhere—with minimal apparent effort or cost, such software obscures the extraction, processing, transportation, and waste necessary to physically realize said geometries. This suggests that the only limits on the material world are processing power and file storage capacity, which poses a challenge as it is becoming increasingly apparent that circular construction is key to minimizing the deleterious environmental impacts of construction (Heisel 2021). Inventory offers an alternative to contemporary CAD software, where the gap between digital models and physical constraints is vast. Rather than abstract commands that project forth a not yet existing material condition, Inventory is based on digital representations of specific pieces of material and processes for fabricating assemblies of parts. By the very nature of their being digital, these representations are necessarily approximations of their physical counterparts. They inhabit the space between the low resolution of pure geometric abstraction and high resolution of physical phenomena, and therefore, might be called “medium resolution” (Sunshine 2022). Inventory uses game engine physics to embed simulations of physical constraints in the digital modeling process. Inventory is a software interface for making architecture in a medium resolution world.