La Voûte de LeFevre Installation

We are truly con­flicted. We are pre-occupied with com­pu­ta­tional design and dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion – com­monly assumed to be rapid, fash­ion­able, and sur­fa­cial, though simul­ta­ne­ously pre-occupied with vol­ume – thick, heavy, ancient, and per­ma­nent. We also main­tain an empha­sis on spec­u­la­tion, and yet our ded­i­ca­tion to real­ity resists this claim. We intend to inno­vate and trans­form the future of archi­tec­ture, yet we look to his­tory in order to do so. Some­where in this milieu of con­fu­sion and con­flic­tion is the ker­nel that defines us.

Marc Jar­zombek recently sug­gested one could deter­mine how well a soci­ety is doing by their abil­ity to pre­cisely carve stone. We like his met­ric for its sim­plic­ity, but also for its assump­tion that we must not be doing so well today. So much of the dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing dig­i­tal design has focused on the sur­face. We are not immune. Much of our pre­vi­ous research has dealt with the eco­nom­i­cally friendly sheet mate­r­ial, while main­tain­ing a com­mon thread of a ded­i­ca­tion to vol­ume. This ded­i­ca­tion orig­i­nally man­i­fested in vol­u­met­ric occu­pa­tion through bend­ing from 2d to 3d. More recently this desire has for­mal­ized into stereotomic (the art of cut­ting solids, most typ­i­cally stone) research with such projects as Periscope: Foam Tower and Tem­po­ral Ten­ancy. These projects mined the past knowl­edge of stereotomy as a way to robot­i­cally carve foam for tem­po­rary instal­la­tions. The irony of these projects is they apply knowl­edge from heavy stone con­struc­tion to light tem­po­rary projects that require ten­sile cables to stand. While the irony exists, these exer­cises in carv­ing solids could also be applied to mate­ri­als with sig­nif­i­cant mass as a way to re-engage the thick, heavy, and per­ma­nent compression-only archi­tec­ture of the past.

Description by designer