towards an architectural fragment

All material tests peformed were intended to establish a form-making logic and related principles that could be translated to full-scale production. Continuing the experiments in folding metal would require several prototyping tests using construction-grade sheet metal. This would likely require a more extensive use of scoring/perforation as a method to instigate folding due to a thicker material thickness, and the act of folding could be performed by a robot (or other machine) capable of operating at a specific pressure, direction, and speed. The introduction of larger scale and more autonomous production tools would be accompanied by similar analyses for the development of alternative uses that contribute to the variation and development of manifested process- and phenomena-based glitches. 

These full-scale prototypes would then be used to guide the design of an overall form for reinsertion at the physical area of experimentation, including design factors such as: the placement of certain fold phenomena in relation to the human body and the existing context, how different types of context lighting affect specific types of folds, the manipulation of reflections from passersby and the existing, and how the overall form can communicate the experience of translated phenomena.

How will people’s understanding, use, and experience of this familiar common space change when they encounter a fragment of its digital interpretation made real?

glitch

While the research experiments stem from a source glitch manifesting in the digital (photgrammetry misregistrations), the final fabrication of a physical glitch in the form of an architectural fragment will be a product of many more collisions (data, operational, material, etc.). The eventual integration of large-scale fabrication machines would necessitate the introduction of new information and respective translation processes from one tool to the next (hardware, software, data conversion, formats, and filetypes). This aggregation and amalgamation of different glitches of varying impact is expected to embed itself in some shape or form into its “final” architectural articulation, potentially directing or influencing an experience that evokes a different kind of spatial perception. The physical manifestation of these phenomena-based glitches would also require further analysis as to how they influence use, awareness, and perception of the existing space and common activities.

While folding was the main approach taken with this research to translate the digital fragments of the Kantinen to something tangible, there remains many alternate approaches that can be used to interpret the immaterial language, qualities, and “grain” of the point cloud. And beyond the specificity of the mode of desired translation, the point cloud is only one way to communicate object-based digital information. With other types of digital data-based media, it is assumed that they each will have their own unique conditions to satisfy, methods of approach, and degree of malleability or way of shaping.

How does the accumulation of glitches from a collection of sequentially ordered operations, interventions, and process(ing)s from different tools, human choice, and uncontrollable environmental influences affect human experience? What lies deeper within the continuous feedback loops connecting the physical and the digital? How does this affect the reciprocity of the human experience and the architecture that is stage to it?