MARJAN COLLETTI + REX | LAB
POSTDIGITAL FRAGILITY
Statement about the Research Content and Process Description
Methodology
This research project is comprised of a series of 13 prototypical transdisciplinary investigations into the agility and fragility of postdigital design. Various teams were established with distinct expertise, with an aim to liberate architectural design from superseded digital techniques while also addressing economic and ecological issues. Alternative design and fabrication strategies were developed to scale-up, adapt and modify existing 3D-printing technologies for the built environment. Software and hardware innovations developed for the series are now widely available.
1. Successive fabrication of complex and innovative prototypes; 2. Scaling-up of existing and new additive manufacturing techniques using bespoke industrial workflows and craft-related processes; 3. Development of bespoke software; 4. Development of bespoke hardware, processes and equipment; 5. Development of bespoke 3D-printable materials.
Questions Dissemination
1. How can contemporary architecture enable transdisciplinary collaboration and re-engage in a wider social and cultural discourse?
The prototypes have been exhibited internationally, including Ars Electronica in Linz and Paris Fashion Week. Several of the prototypes have been shown on national and international news and television programmes, including ORF Austria, ETV Estonia and the BBC. Colletti has co-edited one book, Meeting Nature Halfway: Architecture Interfaced between Technology and Environment (2018), which features some of the projects in the series. He has authored three articles in Architectural Design and eight book chapters related to the work. Colletti has presented the project in four keynotes at conferences in the UK, Italy, Czech Republic and Iran; nine invited presentations and ten lectures.
2. How has digital design and theory evolved from previous decades to the postdigital? 3. Which innovative twentieth-century technological solutions, materials and processes are agile enough to allow a scaling-up of 3D printing for future implementation in the building industry? 4. How does postdigitality approach the fragile relationship between the artificial and natural and the technological and environmental, to move towards a hybrid ecology?
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