Agile Drawing: Expanding the Territory of Architectural Drawing through Digital Fabrication

This paper aims to discuss the expanding territory of the architectural drawing through digital fabrication processes and with this angle suggest an experimental practice in research and education. The core proposition in this paper emanates from our architectural research; and is investigated and exemplified through teaching two workshops held in June 2014 at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. The approach and mind-set was presented to 2nd year students and through series of investigations the aim was to concretise and elaborate the diagrammatic premises described. The students worked with a range of fabrication tools that divide (water jet cutting), add (3D printing) and subtract (5 axis CNC routing) with a focus on the correlation between tool and drawing. The output of the workshop is considered one accumulated body of drawings and artefacts, mapping some aspect of the method put forward in a tangible material approach.
Through an account and evaluation of the work produced at the workshops this paper starts to suggest a way of engaging with the digital workspace that brings an immediacy and complexity to the architectural design process.