Abstract:

For early architectural students, innovation in praxis is often conflated with the technological advances that give rise to ostentatious form and superlative gestures that simultaneously neglects an awareness and appreciation of the details understood at a human scale. While digital technologies afford a range of visualization tools to make these provocative forms seem feasible, they often lack the tectonic resolution that are hallmarks of architectural paragons. An over-reliance on visualization potentially undermines and hinders architectural pedagogy. While it is convenient to condemn the saturation of digital technologies and workflows on this tectonic knowledge gap, the reality is that the solution lies in digital fabrication tools. Rather than prioritizing visualization, digital tools can serve as an excellent media for students to gain greater appreciation of architectonics while simultaneously enhancing their own confidence in developing the bespoke. Digital fabrication tools have provided a new medium for architecture students to develop their design work holistically. Contemporary digital fabrication tools are as ubiquitous as their digital visualization counterparts; it is now a matter of how architectural educators can inculcate these digital fabrication tools as starting points for design as opposed to representation. This paper presents a series of examples where students in the largest architectural program in Canada use fabrication tools in tandem with visualization tools as a workflow for developing design at the macro and micro levels.

Keywords:

Design pedagogy, fabrication, visualization, detail.