描述
Situated within a growing interest in new machine processes by the architectural community, Rise Tectonic Machines! documents Prof. Marcus Shaffer’s progress in designing and realising semi-autonomous city-making machinery. In formulating this work, Shaffer’s writings touch upon various architectural automations past, present, and proposed; ranging from Homeric deidalia, to Tsutomu Nehei’s Builders; from Edison’s Monolithic Pour formwork, to Japanese efforts in saving the working methods of their master craftsmen through technology. In contextualising the many drawings, models, and prototypes that record Shaffer’s evolving machine, the book qualifies a need for automated construction technologies – specifically in environments of human displacement. As warfare, natural disasters, and economic upheaval increasingly turn our cities into humanitarian crisis zones, the book raises a call for devising Tectonic Machines as deployable architectural proxies – as means of transmitting buildings and building beyond the limitations of conventional architectural practices.
As an introduction to the machine specifically, the author demonstrates that formwork systems have evolved over centuries to become mobile/animated systems capable of climbing and flying . The writing makes a correlation between his digi-mechanical, formwork for humanitarian construction efforts, and the evolution of automated building systems in Japan, where building-making machines have evolved into animated tools developed to save and transmit cultural/ritual craft techniques. Ultimately, the goal of the author’s Tectonic Machine work is an embodied mechanical synthesis of our sophisticated/precise building technologies, conjoined with our human building practices, which are essentially cultural/ritual in nature.
Short text essays touch upon: – Conditions in IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) Camps that warrant automated building systems. – The need for emergency city-making as means of housing displaced urban peoples. – The lack of architecture/design in environments of displacement. – The advantages of systems-based approaches to emergency housing as compared to drop-in-place structure solutions. – A history of architectural instrumentation and tectonic machines which includes common devices such as the manual block press, and uncommon technologies such as Thomas Edison’s Monolithic Pour formwork system.
