Symposium

Digital Representations / Analogue Realisations
Phil Ayres
sixteen*(makers)
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/people/A_ayres_phil.htm

Summary
The production context of architecture has recently blossomed with the advent of a multitude of new techniques that cross the realms of both representation and realisation.
Generally referred to as CAD and CAM, these technologies bring the world of manufacturing directly within the grasp of the designer.

But rather than simply establishing a form of neo-medievalism, these technologies permit a reappraisal of design as an iterative process with a linear trajectory towards ‘the made’. The potential exists for design to become an iterative process with circularity in which ‘the made’ can feed local environmental and performance data back to the digital representation, the representation modified, and ‘the made’ to be ‘remade’.

The recent awarding of an ‘Architectural Residency’ in the Kielder Forest, Northumberland, UK, is providing the context for a case study exploring the issues raised by the statements above.

The forest territory is a vast managed landscape exhibiting a multiplicity of conditions in constant flux resulting from the management strategy of the 50 year cycle – a period defining the planting, maturation and harvesting of each forest plot.

By considering the design process as a continual iterative cycle in which the digital and analogue are closely coupled, we might imagine a construct that continually redefines itself in relation to its perpetually changing context, attempting to become increasingly specific to location and purpose over time.

Simple generic mechanisms have been manufactured to be placed in the landscape. They are also digitally modelled. Digital tools have been created to explore the effects of simple transition rules in relation to environmental data. These models are beginning to exhibit great complexity resulting from the low level interactions of simple mechanisms within a complex context.

We anticipate the results of the first iterative cycle this year.

Biography

Phil Ayres graduated from the Bartlett Diploma School, UCL in 1998. He has been teaching and researching there since. During this time he became a partner in sixteen*(makers) – a small collaborative group of Bartlett graduates.

A self-taught computer programmer, skilled machinist and maker, he embraces the increasingly complementary worlds of the digital and the analogue – bridging the realms of representation, fabrication and interaction which feed his interest in developing exploratory design techniques that are often computer mediated, but always lead to physical output.
He has recently embarked on a fully funded PhD at the Architecture School of Århus, Denmark.