Digital fabrication technologies have revived the link between architect
and builder. Through robotics, highly complex and large scale designs are being
created. This lecture will discuss the reconnection of design and construction
and the roles of making.
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Digital fabrication technologies
has reinvented the ways in which the architect interacts with the unbuilt
through digital methods. It begins with the mouse, a motif that Wigley delves
into repeatedly to express the changes currently being experienced in
architectural practice. He deems the mouse as an object which has the power to
connect “us to the digital landscape and
bring the digital in” –
Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 52 [1].
The expressing of the “unseen and unfelt” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [2], he
tells ways the mouse is “extending the
capacity of the body” –
Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [3], as it allows it to move in innovative
ways, in new virtual spaces and as one. By uniting with this bridge to the
virtual world, the body’s senses begin to work in new ways as it begins to bind,
“two organisms into one, allowing the
electrical signals in the nervous system to simulate and be simulated by the
electrical signals in the computer” –
Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [4].
With this concept in mind,
Wigley further establishes that the use of a mouse is extremely architectural
in the ways it draws a connection between the digital space and the user. "In the moment that the mouse connects
the circuitry of the body and the circuitry of the computer, the architecture
in the room is hinged to the architecture in the screen" Wigley, M (2010)
Pg. 52 [5].
“Man and the machine then begin to ‘co-evolve’”
– Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 54 [6], as
computers were brought into the homes, "It
was the mouse itself that made the computer personal, literally domesticating
the digital environment." – Wigley,
M (2010) Pg. 52[7]. It was also brought up that individuals are
no longer expected to extend an arm as our new digitally generated interface is
well within reach, with more modernised ways of controlling a screen – the touch
screen.
Hence, our communication
between our thoughts and the digital space has become, “more compact, even intimate, with the sliding of the fingers across the
screen” – Wigley,
M (2010) Pg. 51 [8], over time. Exploring the ways smaller actions
performed on a screen – simply using our fingers – can ultimately have a greater
effect over larger domains.
Finally, it is while architects
inhabit these digital worlds, where the creation of innovative “thought structures” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 57 [9], can
be implemented and optimised for generations to come.
f i g 1 : " t h o u g h t s t r u c t u r e s "
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| Exploring the concept of "thought structures" in the human brain
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r e f e r e n c e s
[1]
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Wigley, M. (2010). "The Architecture of
the Mouse." Architectural Design: EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing
Planet 80(6): 50-57.
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