Bespoke Fragments: Experiment and experience-driven knowledge production

The Ph.D. -project Bespoke Fragments seeks to explore and utilise the space emerging between the potentials of digital drawing and fabrication and the field of materials and their properties and capacities. Within this span, the project is situated in a shuttling between the virtual and the actual, investigating levels of control and uncertainty encountering with these.
Through tangible experiments, the project discusses materiality and digitally controlled fabrications tools as direct expansions of the architect's digital drawing and workflow. The project sees this expansion as an opportunity to connect the digital environment with the reality of materials – and use realisation and materialisation to generate architectural developments and findings through an iterative mode of thinking about the dialogue between drawing, materials and fabrication.
The control of 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 effect on materials. When drawing embeds not form, but capacity, into the material through fabrication, the emergence of virtual space is no longer limited to the computer's digital world, but extends into the materials' world. Creation and uncertainty are allowed as virtual parameters in both the digital and reality. Based on this notion the project suggests utilising that exact potential to develop architectural designs, tectonics and aesthetics.
In this Ph.D.-project a series a physical, but conceptual, experiment plays the central role in the knowledge production. The experiments result in materialised architectural fragments and tangible experiences. However, these creations also become the driving forces to discuss, link and develop theoretical understandings around the project’s intention and production.