Gil Sunshine

Medium Resolution

Gil Sunshine

Advisor: Axel Kilian Readers: Brandon Clifford & Caitlin Mueller

Extrude, saw, turn, repeat. During the Industrial Revolution, machines and techniques were invented and advanced for forming materials into standardized shapes. This would lead to the development of the industrially mass-produced standardized building materials used today and also transformed architecture into a practice of blind trust in superficially dimensioned materials specified from afar. Extrude, trim, revolve, array. The 3D modeling software used by the architect contains analogs to the machine processes and abundances of industrial production. Today, however, as we increasingly face the effects of the excesses of the Anthropocene and related disruptions to the building material supply chain, architecture must overcome the cognitive grasp of standardization to accommodate the found, the unwanted, the offcut, and the wasted. This produces a new relevance for an architecture of underprocessed and irregular materials.

In order to adapt to material irregularities, architects have adopted various 3D scanning techniques to produce digital representations of materials. By the nature of their discrete sampling, however, these representations vary in their precision. What the architect encounters in the 3D modeling software is not the material itself in its infinite specificities — with its weight, moisture content, and smell — but rather, a surface representation composed of a large but finite set of points. This surface might be called medium resolution. This thesis operates within the medium resolution surface condition, accepting it as a geometric paradigm necessary to respond to emerging material realities.

If there exists an entanglement between 3D modeling software used by the architect and processes of industrial mass production, then in order to realize medium resolution architecture, the 3D modeling software itself must be reconsidered. Inventory, a physics-based 3D modeling software, replaces analogs to the generic surface precision of the standardized material palette ubiquitous in CAD software today with the specificity of pieces of material and precision of actions made possible by medium resolution representations.

Image: Inventory Credit: Gil Sunshine.