Digital Fabrications, the second volume in our new Architecture Briefs series, celebrates the design ingenuity made possible by digital fabrication techniques. Author Lisa Iwamoto explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold. Digital Fabrications presents projects designed and built by emerging practices that pioneer techniques and experiment with fabrication processes on a small scale with a do-it-yourself attitude. Featured architects include AEDS/Ammar Eloueini, Atelier Manferdini, Brennan Buck, MOS, Office dA, Florencia Pita/MOD, Mafoomby, URBAN A+O, SYSTEMarchitects, Andrew Kudless/Matsys, IwamotoScott, Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Chris Bosse, Tom Wiscombe/EMERGENT, Thom Faulders Architecture, Jeremy Ficca, SPAN, GNUFORM, Heather Roberge, PATTERNS, Ruy Klein, and servo.

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask, how do we characterize our post-digital design labor? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products. From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviors, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

Author Christopher Beorkrem shows how material performance drives the digital fabrication process and determines technique. He has recreated and dissected thirty-six of the most progressive works of architecture of the last few years, with perspectives from the designers so that you can learn from the successes and failures of each project. Including step-by-step diagrams and using consistent language and the simplest construction techniques, he identifies the important characteristics of each material, including connection types, relative costs, deformation, color, texture, finish, dimensional properties, durability, and weathering and waterproofing to link the design outcomes to form. The book is divided into five parts by material – wood, metal, concrete, hybrids, and recycled – to help you reference construction techniques for the fabrication machines you have on-hand.

With the increasing sophistication of CAD and other design software, there is now a wide array of means for both designing and fabricating architecture and its components. The proliferation of advanced modelling software and hardware has enabled architects and students to conceive and create designs that would be very difficult to do using more traditional methods. The use of CAD technologies in the production of physical models, prototypes and individual elements is increasingly widespread through processes such as CAD/CAM, CNC milling and rapid prototyping. This translation of computer-generated data to physical artefact can also be reversed with devices such as a digitiser, which traces the contours of physical objects directly into the computer. This book focuses on the inspiring possibilities for architecture that can be explored with all the different technologies and techniques available for making complete designs or their components.

Author Christopher Beorkrem shows how material performance drives the digital fabrication process and determines technique. He has recreated and dissected thirty-six of the most progressive works of architecture of the last few years, with perspectives from the designers so that you can learn from the successes and failures of each project. Including step-by-step diagrams and using consistent language and the simplest construction techniques, he identifies the important characteristics of each material, including connection types, relative costs, deformation, color, texture, finish, dimensional properties, durability, and weathering and waterproofing to link the design outcomes to form. The book is divided into five parts by material – wood, metal, concrete, hybrids, and recycled – to help you reference construction techniques for the fabrication machines you have on-hand.

Digital Manufacturing: The Industrialization of "Art to Part" 3D Additive Printing explains everything needed to understand how recent advances in materials science, manufacturing engineering and digital design have integrated to create exciting new capabilities. Sections discuss relevant fundamentals in mechanical engineering and materials science and complex and practical topics in additive manufacturing, such as part manufacturing, all in the context of the modern digital design environment. Being successful in today’s "art to part" cyber-physical manufacturing age requires a strong grounding in science and engineering fundamentals as well as knowledge of the latest techniques, all of which readers will find here. Every chapter is developed by leading specialists and based on first-hand experiences, capturing the essential knowledge readers need to solve problems related to digital manufacturing. Helps produce the "T-shaped" engineers needed in today’s digital manufacturing age by providing carefully selected foundational information from a range of disciplines Covers every step in the additive manufacturing process, from product design through inspection Addresses business models and socioeconomic trends related to cyber physical manufacturing, along with technical aspects

Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure draws together emerging topics of making that span primary forms of craftsmanship to digital fabrication in order to theoretically and practically analyze the innovative and interdisciplinary relationship between digital fabrication technology and interior design. The history of making in interior design is aligned with traditional crafts, but a parallel discourse with digital fabrication has yet to be made evident. This book repositions the praxis of experimental prototyping and integrated technology to show how the use of digital fabrication is inherent to the interior scales of body, objects and enclosure. These three scales act as a central theme to frame contributions that reinforce the interdisciplinary nature of interior design and reinterpret traditional crafts by integrating new methods of making into conventional workflows. Featuring significant international practitioners and researchers, the selected contributions represent the ever-increasing interdisciplinary nature of design, demonstrating a breadth of disciplines. A foundational text for interiors students and practitioners, Digital Fabrication in Interior Design expands the necessary dialogue about digital fabrication at the scale of interiors to inform design theory and practice.