Digital Fabrication Manufacturing Architecture in the Information Age

The basic premise of this graduate-level elective course, offered for the first time in the spring of 2001, is that the Information Age, like the Industrial Age before it, is challenging not only how we design buildings, but also how we manufacture and construct them. The guiding notion was that the generative and creative potential of digital media, together with manufacturing advances already attained in automotive, aerospace and shipbuilding industries, is opening up new dimensions in architectural design by allowing production and construction of very complex forms that were until recently very difficult and expensive to design, produce, and assemble using traditional construction technologies. The proposition was that the consequences of these changes are likely to be profound, as new digitally driven processes of design, fabrication and construction are increasingly challenging the historic relationship between architecture and its means of production