Larry Sass: Home Delivery

Larry Sass, an assistant professor in the architecture department of MIT, is investigating and teaching digital fabrication, delivery, and fabrication of architecture in a way that he hopes will revolutionize and rebuild our concept of prefabricated homes. His vision for the digital fabrication industry is one in which local rather than factory production is dominant all communications can be wireless and paperless, and all parts can be cut digitally rather than by hand to eliminate error, and thereby wasted materials, time, and money. In his lecture, he particularly stressed this point, saying that all major home prefabricators have gone out of business in the past because of their inability to adapt to new technologies and techniques and, especially, because imprecision and error create costs that add up and are never redeemed.

 

In Sass’s digital fabrication method, error will ideally be eliminated because each piece of an architectural form will be measured and cut with technology that is not subordinate to human error. He had the opportunity to present this method for the MOMA’s competition in Summer 2008 for a new prototype for a modern dwelling. Using the New Orleans shotgun house as a model for the ideal final product, he and his students began by digitally constructing this final form, and then investigated the smaller parts that together make up that whole. In what he called the most difficult part of the process, they broke down the house form into a kind of network jigsaw puzzle pieces that can digitally cut and then assembled into the whole, using almost only friction to hold together an extremely strong house. He called this whole process “Materialization”. His idea for this reconstructed shotgun was that the owner could then customize it by designing his or her own façade to be applied along with the “snap-on” sheathing system that he designed, since the shotgun facades are what make them so unique. This is how, according to Sass, a prefab model can become custom.

 

Listening to Sass detail his methods and ideals, I can’t help but be impressed by his desire to redesign the whole notion of how buildings are constructed, as well as the progress he has already made. If successful, his methods would certainly cut down on error and costs (only 2 of the 5000 pieces for his house were cut wrong), which could in turn contribute greatly to ideas of sustainability and eliminating wastefulness. I am a firm believer in the idea that in order to move architecture forward, we will eventually need to rethink whole ideas of construction and methods. However, I believe that Sass’s methods, though well thought of in a technological sense, lack consideration of those qualities of architecture that are intangible. He said, himself that he was searching for the overlap between Architectural Theory and Technology, because a computer can do many things but it will never be able to generate feelings evoked from abstract spatial qualities. I do not think that his “printed house” idea has yet achieved this balance; while he claims that the people for whom the houses will be built can customize them with unique facades, a “paste-on” façade does not make unique architecture. I see this as not much more than the various color options available to those who chose to live in the prefab McMansions that were recently so popular to many now-bankrupt Americans. This issue, however could be rectified somewhere down the line if this new building method becomes commonplace, whereas there is one other issue that I find fundamentally wrong with this method.

I concede that Larry Sass’s “Materialization” construction method, if well-executed could be revolutionary to the construction and architecture industry. Whereas structure of buildings has been based on principles of loading and support either by post-and-beam or masonry/massive support systems for thousands of years, a friction-based “jigsaw puzzle” of support could make each piece of structure completely efficient and load-bearing, and, as he said, withstand the kinds of forces created by many natural and human-based disasters. Therefore, I am forced to ask why Sass would use such an unprecedented and revolutionary system to create a house that has been built with traditional methods for hundreds of years The shotgun house is one of the oldest American housing typologies, so why simply reconstruct a shell of this type with such technology? If, indeed the idea behind Materialization is to help architects “start anew”, as Sass said, he should have pushed it to its formal limits, demonstrating what new possibilities exist for houses constructed in this way, not simply replicate a type that has existed under old methods for so long. Perhaps that is what the future of this construction method holds, but architects will never adopt it so long as they are limited in its uses by past precedents.

Reading #2: Techniques and Technology, Ali Rahim

Technological innovations have transformed not only architecture but the quality of human life innumerable times in our history. There is a constant “chicken-egg” relationship between cultural events and technological developments that, when innovated and improved upon by architects, inventors, and developers is referred to as the “feedback loop”. While cultural and architectural transformations and movements drive the development of technology, new technological developments simultaneously provide opportunities for cultural innovations. One example of this feedback relationship is the development of the skyscraper as a result of the implementation of steel in architecture, in conjecture with the invention of the elevator; The skyscraper would not be possible to build and use without an elevator, but there would never have been a need for an elevator if there were not these buildings of such great heights.

Ali Rahim’s “Techniques and Technology” explains the difference between a technological advance and a technical refinement: The example he uses is that, while the internet is a technological advance, since its invention has had a qualitative effect on the lives of those who use it (today almost all of the industrialized world), while the fact that modems today are much faster than those of 10 years ago is an example of a technical refinement. While much technological development relies on scientists and engineers, architects also perpetuate technical innovation by pursuing creative means of applying existing technologies and improving upon them until they have been exhausted to the point of developing a whole new set of technology. Architects rework existing methods, but also integrate technologies that are used across many technical fields ranging from film production (Maya) to aerospace and automobile design (CATIA). The design practices that Rahim calls “technological practices” not only use and improve upon but generate new technology, not merely for the sake of efficiency but to explore new methods and approaches to designing.

An example of this kind of innovation undertaken by “technological practice” is the integration of a fourth, temporal (time) dimension into how building forms are generated. While conventional practices see time as mechanical, a “neutral container for events”, and even, theoretically reversible, “technological practices” hold a thermodynamic concept of time, in which processes that occur in time are irreversible, because events produce not only numerical changes but qualitative changes. The “temporal techniques” employed by these firms are defined by three common characteristics: First, contrary to the conventional practice of building “top-down” architecture, that is based on a partie and strives to uphold it throughout development, temporal techniques work in a bottom-up approach, developing simultaneously the many parts of a building within many parameters. Second, temporal techniques are nonlinear, meaning that architectural decisions are not mere 1:1 cause/effect relationships but constant and generative, so that ideally, the end product as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Third, temporal techniques include both numerical factors that are controlled and generated by the architect and virtual, sometimes uncontrollable components.

Two types of temporal techniques that Rahim discusses are generative and transformational. Generative techniques, which rely on automotive and film software that have been developed for architectural purposes, were used to create Greg Lynn’s Hydrogen House by defining several environmental and internal parameters that were subject to change over time (S(t)) to generate forms that responded to the parameters to degrees manipulated by Lynn. These parameters rather than physical partie informed the spaces and forms of the Hydrogen House. Transformational techniques were used by the Kol/Mac studio in the project Housings. This technique applies irreversible shape manipulations to surfaces and forms at points so that not only those points but the entire surface is effected in unpredictable ways. By this technique, architecture evolves and takes on a life of its own that is arrived at in the very end. It is the extreme of bottom-up design.

We cannot begin to predict what technologies will evolve out of the 4d software that are already being used by digital practices, but if history is any indicator, time will not be the extend of dimensional exploration for architects.

READING 1: “DIGITAL MORPHOGENESIS” FROM “ARCHITECTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: DESIGNING AND MANUFACTURING” BY BRANKO KOLAREVI

In the history of human civilization, each era of technological innovation has brought about changes in the way we build and the products we produce. The industrial revolution brought about steel, and with steel, skyscrapers that could reach unprecedented heights, as well as buildings like the Crystal Palace, which could be fabricated off site and quickly assembled, with a temporary quality that was new to the world of architecture. The era we are living in can be classified as the Digital Information age, and the buildings that have so far arisen out of it can be characterized as complex, nonorthogonal forms, or, as Kolarevi refers to them, “blob” architectures. The reason for this influence of digital technology over new architectural forms is obvious: Whereas before the innovation of CAD and CAM softwares, the kind of complex forms that are typified by, for example, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum and Preston Scott Cohen’s Torus house would have been nearly impossible to conceptualize, model, and construct, not to mention astronomically expensive to build, 3D modeling software now affords the opportunity for architects to easily experiment with forms virtually. However, it is not the physical forms themselves that have been most revolutionized by digital practices in architecture, but rather the means of arriving these forms which will most greatly benefit the architecture of the future.

 

Although digital modeling, a remarkably recent tool for architects, has led to much experimentation with complex forms, these forms are not mere arbitrary manifestations of architect’s most outlandish spatial fantasies: The real revolution has occurred in the approach that leads to these forms. The information embedded in digital models allows architects to set up rigorous mathematical geometries and formulas that are used to generate forms.

 

Architects have always operated by setting themselves rules and orders to design within, but with digital media, they can now make these rules infinite and complex in order to generate the “blob like” forms that have gained such popularity. Instead of designing the forms themselves, architects in the future will design the formulas and parameters that can digitally generate forms, and the manipulations applied to these formulas will give architects infinite variations of forms to choose from. In this way, architectural form is layered with information and rules that inform spaces.

 

The information layered onto structures by formulas can be looked at as a kind of fourth dimension of modeling. Although we refer to software like rhino as 3D modeling software, programs like Maya allow architects to create animated “performances” of architecture that not only generate 3D models, but time-sequenced construction, and the formal manipulations that lead to the final product. This dimension is important not only to help demonstrate how complex forms can be constructed physically, but it helps to explain the seemingly random  shapes that have arisen out of these technologies, and show how logical, albeit complex steps and formulas led the architects to “choose” each form.

 

Although the architecture that most famously demonstrates how the Digital Information age has revolutionized the practice has been mostly complex, “blob” structures, the characteristics of this age will not be in the physical structures that are designed but the methods and means by which they are arrived at. For now, the reason for the complex forms is simply that architects are trying to experiment with technology’s full potential, but just that architecture can now be layered with information not only about the form but about external influences that occur on site will help make better, “smarter” buildings that respond not only to a few but a myriad of conditions. In this way, digital technology could be the long-awaited solution to problems from human comfort within spaces to environmental crisis.