Abstract:
Contemporary advancements in mobile
technologies and computer-aided fabrication
systems have signaled the plausibility of
remote construction devices in our near
future. Semi-autonomous building-making
machines capable of quickly (and
continuously) erecting housing, architecturally
dependent micro economies, and emergency
urbanisms, represent our enormous
technological potential to better the lives of
an estimated 33 million people currently living
in I.D.P. status around the world. In addition
to homes and livelihoods, Tectonic Machines,
as digital-mechanical extensions of our human
sensibilities with regards to building, might
also address the cultural and communal
alienation of camp-bound I.D.P.s through
extreme accommodation in producing
vernacular forms and building types. In fact,
the success of these humanitarian-centric
machines will not be measured through an
accounting of their industrial efficiency, but
by their variable capabilities towards
recreating aesthetically relevant replacement
communities to carry functioning cultural
systems and temporary economies, rather
than mere logistics-based holding camps.
These new machine's sensing, "informed",
communicative, and freed from subjugation
to the assembly line, must be devised to
communally design and deliver a great variety
of architectural forms that are
environmentally fit, culturally
accommodating, and spontaneously familiar
(not necessarily new), in their
appropriateness. In this scenario of techno-environmental
mediation, a whole range of
future vernaculars might evolve and develop
as a comingling of old traditions and state-of-the-
art machineries, local materials and global
technologies, community-generated instinct
and experienced formal practices.
In addition to these topics, this paper will
report on the development of a specific
Tectonic Machine currently being designed
for use in humanitarian relief situations and of
the essential role vernacular accommodation
plays in that development. This project has
evolved from a digitally controlled casting
system into something with the character and
capabilities of a robotic collaborator or
construction probe that learns, informs, and
evolves design and construction in
dialogue/partnership' with architects and
displaced communities.
