Digital Media: Experiments in Formwork
Whether precast or poured-in-place, nearly every concrete structure takes shape with the help of a sacrificial structure: its mold or formwork. Techniques for constructing molds and formworks have evolved countless times over centuries yet remain a ripe territory for reinvention. Waste-reduction, ease-of-use, and reusability affect both construction costs and sustainability. Our ability to distribute material where it needs to be – and to limit waste where it doesn’t – has the potential for even larger impact.
As sustainability concerns and new material technologies drive concrete into ever-more-nimble, ever-more-slender forms, an opposing desire haunts our discipline: a nostalgic yearning for stereotomic thickness. Poché, divorced from its pure structural necessity to historic masonry structures, persists under new alibis in contemporary design. Similarly, the graphic techniques of stereotomy–that is, traditionally, of describing cut stone–find application across a range of computational and geometric applications.
In this course, we will attempt to reclaim a stereotomic understanding of surface development towards the production of low-waste, inexpensive and reusable, sheet-derived mold forms. In contrast to many digitally enabled mold-making processes, we will not work subtractively (i.e. we will not use CNC or other routing techniques to carve a negative from a preexisting volume). Instead, we will apply sheet bending and joining techniques to construct a new kind of mold. Casting into these sheet-derived molds, students will test tectonic, structural, and material variables affecting the form and performance of cast architectural elements.
Students can expect to spend the first half of the course constructing tabletop-scale molds and testing the pouring process through a sequence of tutorial-guided weekly assignments. Leveraging lessons learned from the collective body of research developed in the first half, students will move on to independent or small-group development of a tectonic concept using assembled cast parts.