ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ten-point manifesto that identifies the potentials and possibilities of digital fabrication for architects and students of architecture, with a critical eye to larger questions about how such tools can enable the contemporary architect to reassess and reassert new agencies in the construction of built form. This is relatively new terrain for the architect; such workflows demand that architects have a robust grasp of all the parameters that govern the process of digital fabrication, of the particular computer numerical controlled (CNC) machine. The Riverlands Avian Observatory, a design-build project constructed by a Washington University studio led by Andrew Colopy and Ken Tracy, demonstrates how this kind of approach can expand the architect's agency to address problems at multiple scales and in complex and nuanced ways. With technologies of digital fabrication at their disposal, architects have greater ability to ensure precise delivery of complex formal and performative geometries, while producing new paradigms of materiality, workflow, customization, and craft.
