INTELLIGENT FABRICATION 2020

Timber Patterning

​

​

ONLINE LECTURE SERIES

22- 26 June, 2020

​

“The annual workshop Intelligent Fabrication is designed for manufacturing and exhibiting various models on a human scale using – in general – digital techniques to design, project and manufacture a pavilion. 

​​

Elisabeth Lemercier (Architect and Lecturer at ENSA-V) wrote:

"The ambition is to put materiality at the heart of the design process, and learn from the expertise and knowledge of artists or craftsmen/artisans as well as other parallel practices working directly with this matter. 

​

Patterning builds on a vast knowledge of the creation of complex volumes where architecture still seems to be in its infancy. If the disciplines of architecture and couture are comparable in that they both ultimately create enveloped/developed volumes, patterning has the added complexity of needing to dress the body, which becomes both its site and sometimes primary structure.

 

Today, the computer-assisted design has broken boundaries and has enabled new formal explorations, which were not previously possible with architecture’s traditional means of representation.

 

Sewing, patterning and tailoring practices can provide us with new tools, which have been in use and honed for centuries and can translate the complex shape of the body into cut pieces on the flat surface of animal skins and fabrics which, once assembled, recompose the volume of the body.”*

. 

The workshop builds on previous exercices at the School of Versailles by different other workshops on patterning and tailoring (Elisabeth Lemercier) and poplar plywood structures (David Leclerc). The workshop wants to add to these experiments the digital exploration and experimenting as well as the input of digital manufacturing.”

 
Ir. Arch. Klaas De Rycke

 

*ERRATUM: The quotation was falsely attributed and belongs to lecturer and architect Elisabeth Lemercier. It was first used in a workshop in Versailles in 2013. Later translated in English for courses at the Bartlett together with Caroline Rabourdin and Klaas De Rycke.

​