Project details
The integration of digital and computational tools within the procurement processes of the built environment presents transformative opportunities for the industry, fundamentally altering our engagement with the world around us. This shift is crucial in mitigating the built environment's impact on climate change and promoting global sustainability. By enabling more complex tasks to be performed with greater precision and efficiency, and with fewer materials, we can significantly reduce our environmental footprint and contribute to a more prosperous future for our finite planet.
The integration of digital methods within a design and fabrication workflow provides capacity for novel methods of ideation, simulation, optimisation and fabrication within architecture that enable a higher understanding of material engagement and performance-based design outcomes. Additionally, it provides a foundation a higher level of complexity, and potentially irregularity’ in architectural expression that can be expressed formally, materially, or technically.
Undertaken as a park of the School’s Learning by Making program, students were tasked with designing and fabricating an non-standard spatial wall structure that is situated within the Workshop building on the Inveresk Campus. The material pallet was constrained to timer dowels and cubes that were salvaged from Tasmanian’s plantation hardwood testing that were irregular in their physical characteristics. Advanced computational simulation allowed elements within the wall structure to be optimised to the available material. Industry 4.0 integrated manufacturing methods were employed through the use of a 6-axis industrial robot to machine 180 unique timber nodes, while Augmented Reality was utilised in the cutting of timber dowels and the complex assembly process.