Time
Apr 16, 2021–Jul 6, 2021
We have become used to seeing machines autonomously and effortlessly performing extraordinary feats: 3D printers materialize entire homes in under a day, gangly, robotic arms stack gravity-defying brick walls. Such commercial visions imply a future in which robots have taken over every job, including that of architects. But that future is far off. In practice, at least, for the moment, automated fabrication technologies still need us—they require human intervention, a sense for the imperfection and unpredictability inherent to architectural materials. Our robots, in other words, are tuned to maximum efficiency, but lost at the first sign of a mess. Building Productions stages an operational digital fabrication research lab in order to simultaneously reveal and politicize the labor, both human and machine, built-in to automated construction: the aim is not only to critique narratives of automated construction but to offer an alternative vision of the future of architectural labor, too.