Bespoke Fragments: Materials and digital fabrication in architectural design

The PhD project Bespoke Fragments is investigating the space emerging in the
exploration of the relationship between digital drawing and fabrication, and
the field of materials and their properties and capacities. Through a series
of different experiments, the project situates itself in a shuttling between the
virtual and the actual, and control and uncertainty.

The project has established an experimental framework that consists of
three materials and four types of processing. The materials are concrete, wood
and steel. The processes are division, subtraction, addition and transformation.

Through tangible experiments, the project discusses materiality and
digitally controlled fabrication tools as a expansion of the architect’s tool box
and workflow. Bespoke Fragments considers this expansion as an opportunity
to establish a connection between forms of digital drawing and the specificities
of materials. Through that connection, the project seeks to use the realisation
to generate developments and findings and, through an iterative mode of
thinking, establish a dialogue between drawing, materials, and fabrication.

The use of digital fabrication tools through digital drawing opens up
a new approach to materials in an architectural context. The knowledge and
intention of the drawing become specialised through the understanding of the
fabrication processes and their interface with materials. When drawing embeds,
not form, but capacities into the materials through fabrication, the emergence
of the virtual extends into the materialisation. Based on this understanding, the
project produces a series of ‘bespoke fragments’ through the materials and the
machining driven design experiments.

A transverse exposition of the experiments provides an unfolding of
their influential elements. The elements are understood as connected interfaces
that each impact the outcome of the experimentation. This understanding of
the process contributes with a perspective on how the material experimentation
can affect and be affected through the discipline of architecture.