Negative Precision.On-site Fabrication of a Parametric brick Facade//A DIY for Architects/16

A digital brick laying technique, A DIY for Architects

Damavand, Iran
Client: Z.Jabarpour + R. Naghavi
design: sstudiomm
Construction: Behesht construction co. + sstudiomm

Construction Manager: Sadegh Naghavi@ Behesht co.

The final prototype is a facade in Damavand,Iran. It is an independent research and parts of it comes from my MArch Thesis starting 2012 at University of Buffalo NY till 2016 TMU of Tehran.

The project is called : “NEGATIVE PRECISION.ON-SITE FABRICATION OF A PARAMETRIC BRICK FACADE//A DIY FOR ARCHITECTS”. The idea is to fight the surplus precision in order to survive with a very tight budget. It also has one big picture which u can find next at the top that explains the whole process of designing and building the wall  in a form of a DIY.  My thesis is about precision fetishism and at some point professional DIYs as a way of thinking about open-source architecture are discussed.

©ßtudiomm2016

 

 

Enter a caption

 

 

 

Final Prototype.F.Yeah.

 

 

 

It is an independent research, some parts are extracted from Hossein Naghavi’s MArch Thesis.2012BuffaloNY-2016TMUTehran

Digital fabrication has made an excessive degree of precision available to a great society. However, still a considerable part of building industry functions with a lower precision, and uses production methods of the last century. In other words, digital technology is a luxury, though it may not be revealed in the first glance. This research seeks the digital revolution; the phenomenon many other fields (like product design with DIYs) have gone through relying on open-source. To find the barriers this research rethinks the role of human and machine in the production process. The result is a professional  DIY, A DIY for architects.

 

A precedent of this research is walls with rotating bricks by Kohler and Gramazio of Zurich ETH. This research is concerned with finding other methods to reproduce the same effect with brick. The considered methods seek to reduce the budget with a certain degree of leniency on precision and also providing on-site fabrication possibility. In other words, this research is seeking the strategies toward avoiding surplus precision in the design and fabrication process in order to make the luxurious reachable for a greater society. The extent of human-eye ability to distinguish the ambiguity which is called ‘error’ is the focus of the explorations.

 

the research includes a parallel study. Architecture is known to be similar to translation in some or many senses. The faithful/unfaithful dilemma, this time regarding the translation from drawing to matter, is the main concern. The Innate interdisciplinary nature of dualities defining the problem of this research makes it necessary to search fields other than architecture. This research looks to translation studies, cultural studies and humanities through texts by Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha and Donna Haraway in order to find the roots of the architecture’s routine precision fetishism and contradictions coming from it. Contradictions clearly outlined in Francesca Hughes’ “The Architecture of Error” (MITpress 2014), one of the key references of this research.

Another outcome of the research is a 10 pages long kind of article, that only contains 19 quotations. This part uses Hughes’book as a start point and tries to look for the strategy she discusses in her book, a strategy against precision, by looking to other disciplines to rethink the costs and boundaries and cures of precision fetishism in architecture for the sake of economy.

The article can be found next door. I think it is a cool collection, but I am still working on it.

///

Keywords: Parametric Architecture, Digital Fabrication, Brickwork, Brick, Craft, Translation, Error, Precision, Hybrids, Cyborg, DIY, Economy, Hand, Material Studies, Industrial Organization, Modernism.

///

 

 

 

//©sstudiomm2016