Architecture as a Product

Mass Customisation is the principle of producing custom made items to individual unique requirements at similar prices to off-the-shelf, mass produced alternatives.

Gilmore and Pine have identified three different types of customisation and its interesting to see how the definition of the mass customisation can be changed to reflect the various possibilities.

1. Adaptive Customisation - where one standard, but customisable, product is designed so that users can alter it themselves. This strategy is described as being appropriate when the customers want the product to perform in different ways on different occasions, and available technology makes it possible for them to customise the product easily on their own. It is the product itself, rather than the provider, that interacts with customers. Example : the adjustable office chair.
   "Mass Customisation is enabling a customer to decide the exact specification of a product or service at or after the time of purchase, and have that product or service supplied to them at a price close to that for an ordinary mass produced alternative".
2. Cosmetic customisation - where a standard product is presented differently to different customers. The cosmetic approach is appropriate when customers use a product the same way and differ only in how they want it presented. Rather than being customised or customisable, the standard offering is packaged specially for each customer. For example, the product may be displayed differently, its attributes and benefits advertised in different ways, or the customer's name may be placed on each item. This type of customisation is sometimes called 'personalisation'.
   "Mass Customisation is enabling a customer to decide the exact specification or personal attributes of a product or service, at or after the time of purchase, and have that product or service supplied to them at a price close to that for an ordinary mass produced alternative".
3. Transparent customisation - This applies where the company provides individual customers with unique goods or services without letting them know explicitly that those products and services have been customised for them. The transparent approach is appropriate when customers' specific needs are predictable or can easily be deduced, and especially when customers do not want to state their needs repeatedly. Transparent customisers observe customers' behaviour without direct interaction and then inconspicuously customise their offerings within a standard package.
   "Mass Customisation is enabling a customer to decide the exact specification or personal attributes of a product or service, at or after the time of purchase, and have that product or service supplied to them at a price close to that for an ordinary mass produced alternative, or have this exact requirement supplied using the vendor's knowledge of the individual customer's needs".

Computerization profoundly impacted all aspects of design. It has transformed design processes, design economics. It allows collaboration and better interaction between designers and other professional, helping them to visualise better, finding many alternatives, options and solutions, in parallel to picking up problems sooner. It also allows communicating design ideas more effectively, making them more easy to visualise and comprehend by not only industry but by the end users (silent designer) themselves. While the implication on product design has been widely examined, the implications on architecture still stand debatable.

Can architecture be sold as a product? A product far beyond just the sizes, colour and texture.

Links:

http://www.strategichorizons.com/mass.html
http://www.klingmann.com/pdf/ArchitectureasaProduct.pdf

Interactive Buildings…Exploration of Smart Material

Smart Materials are materials that respond to environmental stimuli, such as temperature, light condition, moisture, pH, or electric and magnetic fields with particular changes in some variables. For that reason they are often also called responsive materials. Depending on changes in some external conditions, "smart" materials change their properties (mechanical, electrical, appearance), their structure or composition, or their functions. These materials can be used directly to make smart systems or structures or embedded in structures whose inherent properties can be changed to meet high value-added performance needs.
Application of responsive material in Architecture definitely makes it more responsive, interacting, interesting and adaptable.

L'Institut du Monde Arabe
Architect: Jean Nouvel
Paris, France
In this Islamic Cultural building, Jean Nouvel developed an interacting façade system that responses to the outdoor light condition thus enabling the building interior to get adapted to the surrounding. Behind metal sunscreen with active sun control diaphragms .The huge south-facing garden courtyard wall has been described as a 60m 'Venetian blind'. It is an ocular device of striking originality, made up of numerous and variously dimensioned metallic diaphragms set in pierced metal borders. These diaphragms operate like a camera lens to control the sun's penetration into the interior of the building. The changes to the irises are dramatically revealed internally while externally a subtle density pattern can be observed. Thus the whole effect is like a pierced screen, giving significance and an audacious brilliance to this remarkable building."

Federation Square
Lab architecture studioMelbourne, Australia
The architects developed a grid system that allowed the building facades to be treated in a continuously changing and dynamic way, while simultaneously maintaining an overall site coherence, instead of being traditionally composed as a regularly repeating flat surface. Three cladding materials; zinc (perforated and solid), sandstone and glass have been used within a modular basis established by the triangular pinwheel grid. This fractally incremental system uses a single triangle, the proportions of which are maintained across the single tile shape, the panel composed of five tiles, and the mega-panel construction module composed of five panels. The unique quality of the pinwheel grid lies in the possibility of surface figuration and framing shapes to be independent from the grid's smallest component unit, the triangle.

Links:

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/Lab/federation_square.htm

http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/

Computing in digital architecture

Computing has revolutionized architecture, raising deep philosophical issues that are forcing a paradigm shift in the profession. Computers enable interactive design and analysis, giving designers immediate feed back on the spatial configurations. Computer technology is the latest step in this progression, adding ‘virtuality’ as another dimension to the architect's drawings. Further, computers initiate the development of extraordinarily complex building systems, expanding the possibilities to building interface. Technological advances have helped to manifest these explorations in ever-increasing fidelity, adding dimensions and influencing the way in which the design process is conducted.

Design as a process requires not just the conception and development of design ideas at an individual level, but also the more important aspect of communication and effective expression. Computing has developed a domain where in such reproduction can be made extremely precise or rather ‘super’ precise (beyond reality). CAD tools are increasing their expressive and geometric power to enable a design process in which the computer model can be used throughout the whole design process for realizing the design.

The computer-aided design of buildings is concerned with the creation of three-dimensional objects in space. Two-dimensional drawings are inadequate in fully conveying the conceptual ideas of spatial arrangements. 3-D physical models and virtual prototypes at various scales and levels are important which allow spatial experience and analysis.

Relying on computer generating techniques, we can also obtain multiple architectural manifestations in terms of form, space, structure and materials. Parametric design hence continues to optimize performance of architecture within a more expansive social-economic system. For architectural design, in a time when standard geometric forms almost have been used up by masters, the emergency of computer generating techniques enhance the architects' creative imagination ability and expedite the design process.


The “Kunsthaus Graz” designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, characterized geometrically by its blob-like form is a non-Euclidean object such that cannot be designed and represented by means of conventional plans, sections and elevations. The form of the building has more to do with the ‘strength of the inevitable’, than with aesthetic rhetoric. The development of the form did not arise out of the definition of algorithms and computational methods that automate the generation of architectural form alone, but automated generative approach was the direction for its moving. 3-D models were generated for different aspects such as structure, cladding systems, ventilation and development of the material. The development of an enclosure without recognizable roofs, walls and floors depended on the manipulation of digital 3-D surfaces. The Kunsthaus Graz was designed through a process of deformation of a digital model of a sphere.

Just as with the sketches, physical models are vehicles for developing and assessing design proposals. The role of physical modeling is significant in the evolution of design and as a medium of human interaction. Digital technology has reached a level of embeddedness in architecture at which it is possible and feasible for designers to express design intentions directly without being distracted from the project.