Utilizing New Technology from Scale to Scale:

realizing a pavilion by working with robots

re-mixing residential programmes in pre-war buildings

I joined the brilliant Architectural Association’s D-LAB for an intensive project with lots of scripting and robotic fabrication. At the time, the lab’s research was on robotic fabrication, specifically robotic single-point incremental forming (known lovingly as SPIF), whereby the robot’s tool and tool path slowly apply force curve by curve to a single curve at a time to incrementally form sheets of a given material. In this case, that material was none other than the readily available standby, zinc.

The challenge of working with zinc is how soft it is; yet, that is a perfect condition for testing whether we could utilize SPIF to make sheets into rigid panels — and whether they would be quite so rigid as to build a panelized pavilion with it. Herein I made my greatest contribution — second only to what I contribute in always motivating my fellow designers and builders — that utilizing bubbles/ clustered bubbles for the geometries for SPIF would create arches whereby the forces would create rigidity. More, one could control rigidity in different areas by clustering them either closer or farther apart.

With a ubiquitous density of Neo-Classical buildings along Broadway from w 87th to w 120th, I was set on distorting and disempowering the equally present painful iconography peppered on these buildings while designing a way for people to make more of that premium these buildings exclude — always excluded — specific groups from having: space; that is, more of either living space or public space.

With that, we managed to work together to create and iterate different geometries; that is, local geometries (panel) and overarching geometries (pavilion), and we — with the company of our robot friends — designed, built, and opened a pavilion that proved the more practical possibilities of this interesting new technology — and even provided some shelter from the London rain in the exhibition area.

As Pre-War building windows were mostly standardized in sizing, I employ them to hack – and let people hack – their building façades by deploying different forms that attach into their windows. Here, the 'pods' utilize ergonomics, common non-ergonomic motions, and perception-based parallax projection systems, projecting users’ perception activities within the forms’ interfaces while maintaining material transparency so as not to lose the window.