Fabricate 2011

This publication brings together the work of designers, engineers and makers within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, and computation. Covering a cross section of scales and typologies, the publication features 32 illustrated case studies of completed buildings, new works in progress, and the latest research in design and digital manufacturing. Practices included Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, Arup, Buro Happold, Amanda Levette Architects, Ron Arad Associates, and renowned institutions Delft, Harvard, MIT, The Bartlett, CITA, and the AA. Punctuating chapters on academic and practice-based research, conversations between world leading experts Mark Burry, Philip Beesley, Matthias Kohler, Neri Oxman, Mark West, Michael Stacey, Hanif Kara and Sean Hanna discuss themes on drawing to production, behavioral composites, robotic assembly, and digital craft. As the scope and diversity of work shown here very clearly conveys, new protocols of engagement between the design and making of digital architecture offer disciplines on all sides the challenge to rethink fabrication as a design activity, and to rethink how the necessary expertise to master this field can be acquired. Foreword by Alan Penn and Robert Aish.