Introduction

Architecture is made at different scales: in situ and prefabricated in factories. Manual work is still a key part of the construction industry, alongside advances in digital manufacturing and automation. This research speculates on a hybrid form of production, which highlights neither digital or manual but a new way of thinking and working in architectural design production. With the advent of computerisation, the difference between digital and manual has often been crudely opposed: self-generating geometries are set against wilful formal constructions; digital code-driven productions against hand-operated tools; painless automation against laborious toil; or, simply, robot against human. Digital Manual challenges this opposition, creating a paradigm in which manual production and digital automation work together to allow for the conservation of crafts while integrating technological advances. It proposes that digital fabrication is improved with the help of manual craftsmanship and engages with sustainable materials to form a new mode of production.

Hybridity is compelling because the digital is perceived as the future/emergent, while the manual is the past/obsolescent. Whatever the digital future holds, it is unlikely that the human element of design, particularly in the field of architecture, will completely disappear. One can engage with digital modelling software or make and design by hand, but can we work in between? What kind of questions are relevant if straddling these territories is central to our project? Digital Manual consciously revolves around the hand- and machine-made, viewing design as procedural and systematic yet textural and indexical. Handmade objects leave behind distinctive traces not replicable with machines. Different projects were developed to represent specific ways of working between hand and digital tools. This research illustrates a shift in design and production methodology, readable across multiple projects at different scales.

SUP

SUP looks at ways to work with plastic, to make designs that are both multiuse and reconfigurable. A number of modular building components were made using ‘S’, ‘U’ and ‘P’ shapes that can be endlessly reconfigured. These shapes were extracted from the Hilbert Curve’s folded geometry: a fractal curve that can be folded infinitely to fill a volume. SUP’s components can either be joined end to end or interlocked into complex blocks. It has the potential to be used as an educational toy with endless permutations, akin to Lego, with the user naturally trying to see what fits. While digital processes were used to design the system, it can also be approached manually without any specialist knowledge.

3 ‘Chair design two’, assembled using largescale recycled nylon SUP components.

Code-Bothy

Code-Bothy is a brick pavilion. The first was built at Grymsdyke Farm in Buckinghamshire in 2020, while the second is to be constructed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2021. A bothy is an unlocked shelter that provides rest for walkers. The ‘Bothy Code’ urges users to care for the structure and to be mindful of its surrounding environment. The project inverts the Bothy Code to highlight the reciprocity of different processes. It employs bricklaying using jigs and both physical and virtual guides, including the augmented reality headset Microsoft HoloLens. Of course, one cannot physically touch digital bricks, but it is possible to take a real brick and put it in place of a virtual one. All the information about structure and geometry is held in the digital model, so the bricklayer only needs to focus on positioning the bricks and the quality of the finish.

Balustrade Garden

Balustrade Garden started with experiments using natural materials to construct small structures for animals. The experimentations are grounded in cyclical processes of making using natural fibres and bioplastic. A focus of this project was exploring how a suitable binder can be used for external applications. The project envisions how protective and decorative railings on balconies and terraces can promote diversity of insect species in an urban environment using biodynamic insectaria. The balustrade design is modular and reproducible, and focuses on three key aspects: textures and porosities; pockets of cavities for planting; and adaptive geometry for different built environments. All the balustrades are produced as panels, hand-pressed onto digitally manufactured moulds. The materials used for construction were mainly different mixes of hemp fibre and lime mortar.

4 View of Balustrade Garden installed on top of Fernandez & Wells in South Kensington during London Design Festival 2019.

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Other Works

This research has been developed through a number of other projects, including a series of furniture selected for the group exhibition Le Mobilier d’architectes, 1960–2020 at Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris and the solo exhibition Digital Manual at Aram Gallery in London. Lionel Blaisse, curator of the exhibition in Paris, picked four pieces of furniture by Material Architecture Lab to represent the current and contemporary design direction. The Aram Gallery’s curator Riya Patel selected not only finished pieces but also fragments and material experiments.

Attachment, a forthcoming permanent intervention on a column of a new building in Mayfair, London, extends this research by experimenting with the composition of the column in contemporary construction. Columns are iconic as much as they are indispensable in architecture, from the solid marble of various Greek orders to the modernist piloti. Attachment highlights and expresses the external film of the column as a material with morphological and tectonic properties.

5 SUP at Digital Manual, The Aram Gallery, 2019.

6 Attachment is a permanent polished stainless-steel installation on CNC-milled stone cladding at 61 Curzon Street, London.

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