Digital Methods – Institute of Creative Design and Architectural Drafting

Autonomy of design and automation of construction

The chair of Digital Methods in Architecture employs algorithmic and numeric methods and uses them for the design and realisation of buildings.

Design issues, especially architectural ones, often require either a purely artistic or a purely pragmatic position. Such an artistic position is always linked to a concrete authorship, which legitimates the work in its uniqueness. Pragmatic-rational approaches, on the other hand, attempt to arrive at an ideal solution through the logical synthesis of all factors to be taken into consideration. Working with algorithmic procedures and numerics allows, like perhaps no other medium, to have these two approaches relate to one another. The most remarkable characteristic of these working methods is the possibility of dynamic self-reference, feedback, recursion.

Beyond the possibility of a new kind of tectonics, questions of the autonomy of the work are renegotiated, work whose uniqueness is algorithmically conditioned.

The most fundamental transformation of architecture is still to come after the digitalization of planning and the digitalization of production with the automation of building. The chance of this change lies in the chance to fundamentally rethink building materials and construction processes and thus to arrive at robotic procedures in which materials can be reconfigured in long-term cycles. The chair regards this as a key research focus and thus developing novel robotic construction processes along with material systems and projecting them into the future via student designed projects.

This text was translated from German.