Machining Aesthetics 9 + 1

Presented as part of the Craft Cubed Festival 2013 1st August–31st August 2013 Gallery 2, Craft Victoria

Machining Aesthetics examines architectural design as material and craft production. Through making procedures, the spatial and material prototypes presented in this exhibition explore the interface between material, effects and digital technology. The exhibition features models and drawings of 9+1 projects; each project delivering a vision for a new home for Craft.

Conducted as a design research studio at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, the studio explores new aesthetics in digital fabrication. The exhibition is curated by Joe Pascoe. Paul Loh and David Leggett (aka LLDS/Power to Make) are the studio directors.

Graphic Design: Joel Collins Cover: Chunchen Zhang & Joel Collins Through this project Paul Loh and David Leggett take us on a journey with their students, through a series of creative steps, to develop a range of crafted build- ings for Craft Victoria to possibly inhabit. The students’ brief as emerging architects was to come up with designs for a new building that was itself a crafted response to the formal requirements of the client.

The approach was a mix of imagination and high technology; the students, working in small teams, had to develop a ‘touchstone’ which was rather like an abstracted interpretation of a building structure they admired. For instance, a study of Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ron- champ resulted in clay tiles that explored the differing properties of refracted light, a feature of Ronchamp. Then, using Craft Victoria’s practical requirements of floorspace, services and site, a marriage of technologies and actual crafting occurred with the introduction of com- puter programs such as Grasshopper to morph the discoveries inherent in the touchstone with the client’s needs in order to construct the models you see in the exhibition.

This description is much too simple of course, but it is a reliable guide in terms of an overview of the many elements used in this project; sight, feel, scale, imagination, location, knowledge, materials, technology and construction. To this list one should also add team work and the international perspectives present in the tutorials as the students themselves come from different parts of the world. It has been observed that craft has a special role in Melbourne. With its close cousin design, it has been part of the city’s DNA ever since Hoddle laid out the grid of the central city. And our contemporary appreciation of the cobbled laneways and the voiced concern of many citizens continue to have a positive impact—it is a great city that has the beautiful pedestrian scale of ancient walled cities, without the walls! A city of artists perhaps.

Machining Aesthetics opens up the opportunity, through direct example, of establishing another landmark state- ment—a new crafted building for Craft Victoria—which could be the equal in vision to that which foresaw the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Bruce Armstrong’s Eagle, and going back in time, J. J. Clark’s Treasury Building. Such structures often make us all feel complete as individuals as well as engendering a sense of shared destiny, a characteristic of Melbourne’s society that is worth encouraging into the future.

I congratulate Paul Loh and David Leggett and all their students in bringing forth Machining Aesthetics. Their presentation within the beautiful form of a pod speaks eloquently of the potential and growth that lies ahead in contemporary architecture.

Joe Pascoe Former CEO & Artistic Director Craft VIctoria

Machining Aesthetics shows us the direction in which the modern world could go. It is an optimistic exhibition, demonstrating that technology is capable of human outcomes. It honours the time and space we are all in now in an exciting demonstration of the notion of moving from design to craft, a theme that returns the power to make to both sides of the digital divide.

‘Even when making is experimental and openended, it observes rules. Craft always involves parameters, imposed by materials, tools, scale and the physical body of the maker. Sometimes in making, things go wrong. An unskilled maker, hitting the limits of their ability, might just stop. An expert, though, will find a way through the problem, constantly unfolding new possibilities within the process.’

Daniel Charny, Power Of Making V&A, London 2011

The quote by Daniel Charny from the V&A exhibition in London has become the motto of the studio; reading it at the start of every design meeting like a ritualistic prayer. The aim is to morally encourage the students to push the boundaries of their craft by being persistent with the making process. This catalogue captures the work of 25 participating students, all part of the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. The design project is a culmination of two semesters of work; annotated as V.0 and V.1. Each semester of the studio is like an updated release of software. Each version is given a different site but operates within the same design agenda. V.0 site is Craft Victoria’s current home in Flinders Lane, while V.1 site is the corner of Russell Street and Flinders Street on the Jolimont Railyard. Each site poses a different challenge and relationship with the city.

This exhibition showcases 9+1 aesthetics of making born out of material research that is driven by digital technology. The word technology implies the use of tools, machines, processes, craft and organisational techniques to solve a particular problem. Without a problem to solve, the tools, machines, processes, craft and organisation are merely useless, as William Morris pointed out in his book, Sign of Change first published in 1888, ‘our epoch has invented machine… and of those machines we have yet made no use.’ Strangely, after 125 years this statement is still relevant to our contemporary discourse. The question then is the question of the problem. The question of aesthetic cannot be resolved through a singular technological solution, nor can the question of craft. What can be posited is the relationship of Craft and technology, or more precisely on a contemporary level, that of digital technology. Can Craft be digital?

The 9 projects for Craft Vic explore making as design process. By elevating it to a process of design, it assumed making in itself is a conscious and willful act of material and spatial manipulation. As it is Here, we return to Charny’s statement on Craft as open-ended experiments that observed rules; rules that can be algorithmic as well as procedural. The 9 projects oscillate between the procedure of making and computational algorithm. The act of moving back and forth constructs a feedback loop from which the computational algorithm mimics and evolves with the making procedures and vice versa; making becomes part of the computational process. Machine Craft, Urban Cave and Light explore casting as methodology and develop an algorithmic logic in the making of their moulds. Machine Craft took this algorithm logic literally by designing machines that contain parameters which can be adjusted; a single mould that can output variations of the same artefacts.

Part of making is the tooling procedure; another contributing aspect to the aesthetics of artefacts. Tools as an instrument or means of manipulating material through additive, subtractive or transformative procedures are an integral aspect of making. All the artefacts in the exhibition at some point during the making process utilised Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines. The different tooling processes deliver specific sensibility of making and results in a particular aesthetic. Here, aesthetic is less of how the object looks but of what effect it will produce. In the Glitch, Strip Topology and Reflection–Refraction, tooling procedures become the principal driving force behind the making; the craft is in the manipulation of the digital information behind the tooling process.

Part of craft is the organisation of material; material as matter and as information. For the studio both organisation logics are relevant in the formation of an aesthetic. Materials as matter is explored through transformative procedures; push, pull, bend and twist. Material as information is explored through positioning of matter in space and the tooling procedure.

When two types of organisation collapse into a single process then something else happens. We often describe this as effects; a phenomenon that could only be perceived or experienced as opposed to being quantifiable. In the Distorted Labyrinth, Continuity and Flicker, each plays out the organisation logic to the extreme; creating spatial distortion through material manipulation.

Finally, the +1 project is the vessel itself. A vessel designed to contain all the models produced by the 9 aesthetics. It is a curatorial tool to display the objects within a coherent gesture; like a vitrine in a museum it embodies the matter and information of the artifacts. Architecturally, it invites visitors to walk through the structure and experience the vessel like a Melbourne lane-way. Composed of a field of 275mm square base grid, volumes are subtracted from the primary structure to form useful compartments to house the artefacts. It is constructed using 16mm thick lightweight MDF; the product is called Prolight and is supplied by Nover & co. A series of LED light boxes are distributed around the vessel for displaying drawings. The effect is a pulsing form with glowing vibrancy comparable to active street façades of a city center metropolis.

We faced a challenge to design the vessel 6 months prior the installation of the exhi- bition; not knowing the number of models and their size it has to contain. The design team resorted to designing the information structure of the vessel; a series of computation scripts that can be parametrically adjustable to cater for the unknown information. The vessel is itself a blueprint, incidentally the theme of the Craft Cubed Festival 2013.

Paul Loh +David Leggett LLDS