Agency of Material Production Feedback in Architectural Practice

Contemporary timber design and fabrication represents a dramatic shift from earlier craft-based timber traditions through the introduction of automation, computation, and large-scale engineered timber. These have allowed timber projects to grow both in scale and complexity, and have created possibilities for new forms of timber buildings and new uses for timber in architecture and construction. However, the complex nature of wood - a live and organic material - presents challenges for fabricators and designers due to its behaviours and tendency to change form in response to environmental and internal factors. This is especially felt in the development and construction of large-scale, free-form timber buildings where the performative demands of wood are much higher. Advances in computational workflows and machine technology have opened up the possibility of using real material behaviour as an input to both the control systems involved in fabrication as well as the early design stages and digital models of an architectural project. This presents opportunities for new types of flexible and materially-aware adaptive design-to-fabrication paradigms at an industrial scale. This integration of material behaviour and performance into the design and fabrication of free-form timber structures is the focus of a partnership between an InnoChain Early-Stage Researcher (ESR), Dsearch - the computational design group at White arkitekter AB, and Blumer-Lehmann AG - a timber contractor specializing in the development and production of complex timber projects. We present a case-study from this collaboration: the design and development of a timber bridge in Stockholm, Sweden, informed by two industry secondments with both industrial partners over several months. The key points of focus are how research can be conducted within the contrasting settings of industrial timber fabrication and multi-disciplinary architectural practice during live projects, and how the notion of material performance and feedback can be integrated in both domains. A secondary focus is to show how research conducted in parallel industry environments (architectural practice and production) can act as a broker of expertise between these environments, as exemplified with production feedback in early-stage design in architecture.