Digital Making with Patchers, Bridge People and 'Funny' Fabbers

The field of architectural design has, in the last years, shown an increasing interest in SF. This interest can be as simple as adopting the imaginative freedom that SF inspires, or it may be directed towards SF as a conceptual space to create, test, and critique the utopian speculations of architectural practice or the impact of emerging technology on design. This paper discusses the relationship between 3D printing technologies, non-alienated labour, and urban cultures in William Gibson’s The Peripheral, with additional reference to Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties from the Bridge trilogy. Each of these novels shows additive manufacturing technology as crucial for the contestation of ownership and belonging in urban futures.

In an overly literal interpretation of world-building, the paper describes how this reading of 3D printing technology becomes a vehicle for experimentation in architectural design. Such experimentation appropriates the estrangement of Gibson’s text as a “site” to resituate making cultures in relation to new material and technological constraints and opportunities. This interpretation is not only descriptive, but also projective, and the paper showcases built speculations in digital fabrication, with new implications for sustainable, ethical, and aesthetic practices in architectural design.