Imagine a garden shed is sucked into a computer, digitized and then spat out bigger and materially transformed
Sto Werkstatt’s new exhibition, One Thing After Another designed by Sam Jacob Studio, is making its debut as part of Clerkenwell Design Week 2016. Sto Werkstatt has invited Sam Jacob Studio to create a unique installation for the Werkstatt’s gallery space that explores the exchange of information between digital and physical worlds. One Thing After Another will run until the end of June 2016 as part of London Festival of Architecture.
One Thing After Another is a project that starts with the most mundane yet essential form of architecture - a garden shed. The structure is 3D scanned to create a digital copy which is then processed and scaled to fabricate a new CNC’d version from Sto’s lightweight construction material Verolith, made of 90% perlite, a type of volcanic stone.
The original shed sits surreally inside this larger digital version, and is reflected optically by the mirrored StoVentec Glass cladding on the interior. Inside it contains a doll-house scaled copy of itself. It is architecture arranged like a Russian Doll where one version of a thing sits inside another.
Through the technologies of 3D scanning and digital fabrication the original building is both replicated and made different. The original building is transmitted into a new state: bigger and materially transformed. Instead of seamlessness and efficiency, it is concerned with representation and fidelity, using digital tools as a way of transforming the everyday.
One Thing After Another argues for an understanding of the possibilities of digital production that go beyond the blandly futuristic. Instead it suggests that new technologies can open up a wide array of design possibilities which embrace imperfections, processes of making and embeds these narratives and histories back into the material and form.
Amy Croft, Curator at Sto Werkstatt said:
Through One Thing After Another we have had the opportunity, across Sto, to interrogate the processes of digital design and manufacture. This exploration, which we have had the privilege to make in close collaboration with Sam Jacob Studio, has not only shown us new exciting forms that are possible with our material Verolith, but a new attitude toward the digital processes. It is through Sam Jacob Studio’s unique approach that we have witnessed the potential of digital manufacturing processes to finish a material with the familiarity, warmth and character commonly felt from a hand-finished surface.
Sam Jacob, Director at Sam Jacob Studio explained further themes the installation will explore:
One Thing After Another is part of a series of projects we’ve been working on that explore the possibilities of digital inputs and outputs. They explore how objects can be transmitted through forms of technology and how that transmission leaves its trace within architectural substance - both a recording of a thing and that thing simultaneously. This ‘post-digital’ architecture is more than building: It’s information that remains in flux, that can be evaporated, distilled and precipitated between digital file and physical construction then back again. Technology gives us new ways of seeing that in turn transform the world.
comments