The experience of reading the digital fabrication on architectural practice through the architectural offices

According to A Dictionary of Construction Surveying and Civil Engineering, "Fabrication" is defined as "the construction or manufacture of something, which involves many consecutive steps or procedures" (Gorse ve arkadaşları, 2012). Digital fabrication includes all the tools and methods used to produce physically create the design from a digital environment. William J. Mitchell (2003) states that we can think of digital fabrication tools as machines that automatically transform a digital object in a design world into a material reality. CNC and robot-based digital fabrication tools and CAD/CAM software are firstly involved in the machine and industrial engineering disciplines (Kolarevic, 2004). Pease (1952) states that the first digital fabrication tools were invented in the 1940's in MIT Servomechanism Laboratory by connecting a milling machine to a computer. In this study, the roles of human operators were transferred to computers to produce complex geometric aircraft components quickly, more precisely and with high quality. There was another important event happened in the 1980's for the digital fabrication; the 3D printing technology was invented (Lipson & Kurman, 2013). A lot of fabrication laboratories (Fablab) have been opened all over the world since 2000, and so access to digital fabrication tools has become more easily. As a consequence of those new laboratories, the development of new digital fabrication tools was accelerated. On the other hand, the usage of digital fabrication in architecture is more recent. The first examples of them are a direct transfer of already available tools from other disciplines to the architecture. Today, a lot of original digital fabrication researchs are being made in architecture. Especially research focusing on robotic arms and drones are crucial for architecture theory and practice. While digital fabrication tools were developed in 1940's, the cognitive background had worked much earlier. In Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti differentiated the intellectual act of designing from the act of construction in his book, De Re Aedificatoria. According to Alberti, the architect takes responsibility for the design; the construction company, for the construction (Strehlke, 2009). Sharif and Gentry (2015) thinks that digital fabrication in architecture correlates a new kind of relation between cognitive part of design and construction that is different with ordinary artisan way. With the usage of digital fabrication tools artisans evolves to digital maker role. Industrial Revolution, need for reconstruction of post-war demolished cities and developments of construction techniques changed the cognitive landscape of architecture and made mass customization an important part of architectural practice. However today, mass customization that each piece can be produced specially and economically by using digital fabrication becomes a new concern of architecture. Describing digital fabrication in architecture only as a way of production is a limited perspective. It is solidly tight to the architectural design process and the new possibilities that are created by new digital fabrication tools. In this context, usage of digital fabrication reaches beyond the purpose of producing final products and is also services as a new instrument for the design process. The primary focus of this study is determining and describing the effects of digital fabrication research in the universities and independent architectural research centers, on architectural offices that serve the current architectural practice. For this purpose, 27 native and ten foreign architectural offices are selected according to above criteria and contacted for interview requests (Appendix A2). Interviews were done with two foreign and six native architectural offices and because of the studies that examine the effects of digital tools on the understanding of architectural design, the academician of Liverpool University Tuba KOCATURK (Appendix A1). During the research process, some problems and difficulties arose. At first, the access to some architectural offices, and their data, that use digital fabrication efficiently was limited because of the physical distance. Also, some architectural offices did not prefer the share information about their design process. Although it is not possible to reach a general conclusion about architectural offices, because of the limited number of interviews conducted, the impression obtained is that; the use of the design process in architectural offices remains limited, despite the fact that many theoretical and experimental studies related to digital fabrication are taken place. Main reasons for this situation are the lack of awareness about digital fabrication in architectural offices, lack of skilled architects who can use digital fabrication tools and have not enough experience, the high price of these tools, and the lack of demanding environment for the use of digital fabrication tools. On the other hand, the restriction of use digital fabrication tools in the building site is mainly because of lack of technical abilities of those devices. Also, these tools are still very unstable for the construction site environment. As a result of the study, architectural offices have been able to benefit from numerical fabrication tools in the works of installation, furniture, interior design, sculpture, pavilion and façade scale. Despite those obstacles, there can be many reasons for the usage of digital fabrication tools in the design process in architectural offices. Two of them are thought more efficiently than others. These are: • The architectural offices, such as Snohetta and Heatherwick Studio, which design and produce a sense of craftsmanship in their own design culture, have workshop environments where experts from different disciplines, artists, and craftsmen contribute to design together. Digital fabrication tools have easily adapted to this kind of design environment. • The architectural offices, which include architectural approaches to complex geometric forms, find it more efficient to use digital and physical representations together in the project development process. At this point, architectural offices use digital fabrication tools to gain more the fluid design process by improving the interaction between digital and physical environments. In the course of this thesis study, it is thought that especially two topics related to digital fabrication are worth doing new research. The first one is the usage of the robotic arm in architecture. Experimental studies on this subject are highly promising. The second one is about the usage of digital fabrication tool in architectural education. In this study, it has been revealed that it is better to give digital fabrication education at universities. In conclusion, digital fabrication in architecture could be a new tool in the discovery of opportunities outside of the boundaries of the day, as William J. Mitchell (2001) states that: "Architects tend to draw what they can build, and build what can they draw."