Lab Talk Series

Craftsmanship in the Digital Age

A series of Lab Talks and Round Table expert workshops on the potential of digital technologies to trigger innovative responses to the design and making of architecture.

With the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, NOWlab and Forschungsinitiative Zukunft Bau (BBSR)

Date: 2017

Place: ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, Christinenstr. 18–19, 10119 Berlin

Introduction

Craftsmanship in the Digital Age invited established manufacturers, proponents of newer digital production tools, architects, and building industry representatives, to co-articulate a craftsmanship approach to incorporating digital fabrication into architecture.

Rather than seeing digital tools as incongruous with craftsmanship, Craftsmanship in the Digital Age proposes that they could in fact strengthen certain skills and principles characteristic of craftsmanship with benefits for architecture and manufacturing, including; more effective building materials and spatial typologies, a closer working relationship between architects and manufacturers, and an assertion of critical values for the building industry at this point in history, especially regarding energy and resource sustainability.

We are at a point in history when mankind’s drain on the earth’s resources is finally acknowledged, but barely controllable. As Richard Sennett summarised (2008:12. Sennett R. The Craftsman. Yale University Press): “In both natural resources and climate change, we are facing a physical crisis largely of our own human making…To deal with this physical crises we are obliged to change both the things we make and how we use them. We will need to learn different ways of making buildings and transport and to contrive rituals that accustom us to saving. We will need to become good craftsmen of the environment.” Concurrently, a new age of digital production has dawned, promising expanded product functionality and alternative design-to-making processes with new, environmentally friendly materials. Yet, it has made little impact on the seemingly unstoppable march of mass production and mass importation of products.

Delivered as series of five Lab Talks and workshops, Craftsmanship in the Digital Age showcased from the present-day studio, factory, laboratory and building site, while simultaneously exploring a future blurring of these work spaces and their products.