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News > Advancing Architecture and Design > Duomo Meets Digital

Duomo Meets Digital

Mixed-Reality Fabrication Creates New Opportunities for Handcrafted Architecture
Univeristy of Tasmania - Fologram
Univeristy of Tasmania - Fologram

By: Jesse Mainwaring, AIA

Since its inception, AIA Philadelphia’s Technology + Innovation Committee has focused much of its effort elevating technologies that thread emerging digital technique to the ever-present traditions of handcraft in architecture.  We too often see that craft and technology are put into a counterproductive opposition: digital vs. analog, precision vs. expression, automation vs. handwork, certainty vs. risk, and on and on.  While this may sometimes ring true, certain digital technologies are generating opportunities not to replace human endeavor in design and construction but extend handcraft into new formal, experiential and sustainable expressions, where one side cannot easily be distinguished from the other. 

One such technology, aptly named, is Mixed-Reality Fabrication (MR). Often referred to as augmented-reality, this hybrid methodology allows builders and craftspeople, like masons, to work directly from digital models using headsets that integrate real-time 3-D graphics into a view of the physical world.  This provides an innovative workaround to the limitations of conventional documentation and construction techniques by providing a virtual gauge against which builders can directly work, allowing for complex geometry and streamlined construction. 

This synthesis of digital and manual technique is producing unique structures that are simultaneously novel and familiar, digitally derived yet humanistic in materiality and impact.  For instance, in 2023, SOM teamed with Princeton’s Form Finding Lab to produce a double-curved, vaulted entrance to a gallery in Venice. Inspired largely by the construction technique of Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, the vault uses self-supporting clay bricks, constructed by hand using MR headsets into a geometric form that would be incredibly challenging to produce with prior conventions.  Additionally, the use of MR allowed the masons to reduce the amount of temporary support structure and along with it a good amount of waste.  The result is an intervention that is clearly contemporary in its geometry and just as clearly an expressive handcrafted structure, all the while using fewer resources.

   

The Angelus Novus Vault has a double-curved structure , The brickwork is laid in a herringbone pattern


This September, The International Masonry Institute along with the Technology + Innovation Committee will be hosting a hands-on workshop at IMI’s Philadelphia Training Center for architects to explore bricklaying in MR.  Interested folks can sign up at the link below.  

https://aiaphiladelphia.org/events/view/bricklaying-in-augmented-reality-workshop

Sources:

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/06/01/som-princeton-university-self-balancing-arch-venice-architecture-biennale/

https://docs.fologram.com/0ef4fc03-e90e-414b-9a7e-efb6369278d3

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