Stratigraphic Strips: Variable Dimensions

The two projects created for the exhibition discuss two forms of reality: ‘the constructed and the revealed’. The installation oscillates between the scientific reality of Howard’s painstaking conservationbased stratigraphy and a fictionalised representation of that knowledge through the use of historic colour windows placed at key locations within the East Wing. The actual layering of the decoration within each space is both real and speculative - the distinction between the two often blurred, providing the viewer with an insight into the life of the spaces they use. Alan Chandler is a Specialist Conservation Architect with the London based practice Arts Lettres Techniques and a Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. Helen Howard is a Scientific Officer [Microscopist] at the National Gallery in London, an expert in non-invasive investigations of wall painting using optical coherence tomography and hyperspectral imaging. Architect Gilles Retsin works as senior designer at Kokkugia and directs computational architecture at the University of East London. Retsin’s computer coding explores the hidden structural details and materiality of buildings

Robotic Spatial Printing

There has been significant research into large-scale 3D printing processes with industrial robots. These were initially used to extrude in a layered manner. In recent years, research has aimed to make use of six degrees of freedom instead of three. These so called "spatial extrusion" methods are based on a toolhead, mounted on a robot arm, that extrudes a material along a non horizontal spatial vector. This method is more time efficient but up to now has suffered from a number of limiting geometrical and structural constraints. This limited the formal possibilities to highly repetitive truss-like patterns. This paper presents a generalised approach to spatial extrusion based on the notion of discreteness. It explores how discrete computational design methods offer increased control over the organisation of toolpaths, without compromising design intent while maintaining structural integrity. The research argues that, compared to continuous methods, discrete methods are easier to prototype, compute and manufacture. A discrete approach to spatial printing uses a single toolpath fragment as basic unit for computation. This paper will describe a method based on a voxel space. The voxel contains geometrical information, toolpath fragments, that is subsequently assembled into a continuous, kilometers long path. The path can be designed in response to different criteria, such as structural performance, material behaviour or aesthetics. This approach is similar to the design of meta-materials - synthetic composite materials with a programmed performance that is not found in natural materials. Formal differentiation and structural performance is achieved, not through continuous variation, but through the recombination of discrete toolpath fragments. Combining voxel-based modelling with notions of meta-materials and discrete design opens this domain to large-scale 3D printing. Please write your abstract here by clicking this paragraph

Serial, Discrete, and More

Architecture as a continuously evolving organic body, growing and adapting under external forces - the prevailing paradigm for computation in the past two decades - is under pressure. This lecture will explore how that paradigm has undermined architecture’s autonomy, and has fundamentally always been in trouble with tectonics. Increased computational capabilities are able to push the modernist understanding of architecture as an assemblage of prefabricated, discrete elements into an unexpected new domain of previously unachievable detail, materiality, structure and aesthetics

High-Res Architecture

Gilles Retsin Architecture is a London based architecture and design practice investigating new architectural models which engage with the potential of increased computational power and fabrication to generate buildings and objects with a previously unseen structure, detail and materiality. The studio is interested in the impact of computation on the core principles of architecture – the bones rather than the skin. Gilles Retsin graduated from the Architectural Association in London, prior to founding his own practice, he worked in Switzerland as a project architect with Christian Kerez, and in London with Kokkugia. He also co- founded SoftKill Design, a collective design studio investigating generative design methodologies for additive manufacturing and 3D-printin

Very Strange Mereology, EAB#2

Increased computational capabilities push architecture into a new domain of previously unseen detail, materiality, structure and aesthetics – fuelling a renewed discussion about the continuous versus discrete nature of architectural systems

Strange Eclecticism : Alien, Messy and Discrete

The Alien, the Messy and the Discrete will be identified as intrinsic properties of the recent shift in architectural theory from the field back to the object. What are the fundamental relationships between heterogeneity, computation and object-oriented thinking? In contrast to the biological paradigm which views architecture as an organic whole, this lecture will propose architecture as a high-resolution assemblage of discrete objects, giving rise to extreme heterogeneity and information-density