ABSTRACT
The development of “consumer CNC” – small routers, 3D-printers, and laser cutters that are as easy to operate as office printers – opened the doors to rapid prototyping for a wide audience at universities and design practices. Unfortunately, scaling up the results to real-size architecture is not that easy. In a production environment, things are considerably more complex. The methods are not scalable, as quantity, logistics, and integration into the building process become an issue, and the complexity shifts from the machining of material to the processing of information. The limitations are no longer defined by the hardware, but mostly by the software that creates the machining data. When the methods predefined in the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems are not applicable, it is sometimes more efficient to create custom solutions that exactly map the necessities of a specific design to the capabilities of the production environment. Custom-building systems and tailor-made fabrication processes are often the most economic way to translate an idea into reality, especially in architecture, where complex shapes are usually built from large numbers of individual components. The descriptions of five recent projects that follow illustrate this approach.
