Publications

Eytan Mann, PhD Candidate The Palestinian village of Lifta, located beneath the western entrance to the city of Jerusalem, holds a deep history within its site. Evacuated by the newly established Israeli military forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – or the Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’) as it is referred to by the Palestinian population –… Continue Reading Site-Archive-Medium: VR, Architectural History, Pedagogy and the Case of Lifta

With the growing environmental imperative, designers begin to consider material life-cycles, and return to locally-sourced and on-site found materials in their design. Within this context, and in light of the high contribution of material-transport to the environmental burden, architects re-explore earthen materials. The ability to perform in situ digital fabrication using advanced robotic fabrication tools… Continue Reading Contextual Digital: Localizing Large-Scale Robotic Fabrication in Architecture

Recent advancements in architectural robotics allow to explore the coupling of manual craft with digital tools. However, current methods remain limited in capturing the qualities and nuances in manual techniques. This paper presents a protocol for transferring stone crafts to robotic fabrication, towards an autonomous process. Relying on advanced sensing and fabrication tools, the protocol… Continue Reading Human Sensibility, Robotic Craft: Toward Autonomous Stonework

Advancements in autonomous robotic tools enable to reach increasingly larger scales of architectural and landscape construction and operate in remote and inaccessible sites. In parallel, the relation of architecture to its environment is significantly reconsidered, as the building industry’s contribution to the environmental stress increases. In response, new practices emerge, addressing the reshaping and modulation… Continue Reading A Pedagogical Protocol for Iterative Robotic Fabrication on Remote Grounds

The irreversible imprint of humankind on earth calls for revisiting current construction practices. This paper forwards a vision for post-Anthropocene, large-scale, architectural and landscape construction. This vision relates to the way natural terrains can be transformed into architecture using robotic tools, and the way advanced in situ digital fabrication can enable attainment of greater sustainability… Continue Reading Sensibility at Large: Post-Anthropocene Editing of Landscapes

Recent advancements in architectural robotics allow to explore the coupling of manual craft with digital tools. However, current methods remain limited in addressing high-skill, custom tasks involving material uncertainty. In this context, the paper presents three capacities that stand at the core of performing autonomous robotic craft. These include: documenting the movements and gestures of… Continue Reading Autonomous in Craft: Embedding Human Sensibility in Robotic Fabrication

This essay presents an exercise that was performed by an architect and a neuroscientist as the means to produce a method in which a robot can practice crafts usually performed by humans.The ideas exchanged in this discussion defined a framework for a set of experiments examining the possibility of integrating concepts and methods from both… Continue Reading Exercises in Style: A Transdisciplinary Discussion

Advancements in robotic fabrication are enabling on-site construction in increasingly larger scales. In this paper, we argue that as autonomous tools encounter the territorial scale, they open new ways to embed information into it. To define the new practice, this paper introduces a protocol combining a theoretical framework and an iterative process titled Informing Grounds.… Continue Reading Informing Grounds: Robotic Sand-forming Simulating Remote Autonomous Lunar Groundscaping

It is 75°F inside, and 9°F degrees outside. It is late April, yet the ground is still covered with snow. The diner is dark, the solstice sun falling on the leather upholstered double-bench, ready to seat four. The Hotel Royal is empty though faint sounds of dishes being cleaned arise from the back. It is… Continue Reading Northern Polarities: Canadian Subarctic Impression

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach… Continue Reading Instabilities and Potentialities: Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture