NEGATIVE PRECISION.ON-SITE FABRICATION OF A PARAMETRIC BRICK FACADE//A DIY FOR ARCHITECTS
Damavand, Iran
Client: Z.Jabarpour + R. Naghavi
design: sstudiomm
Construction: Behesht construction co. + sstudiomm
Construction Manager: Sadegh Naghavi@ Behesht co.

This is an independent research, some parts are extracted from Hossein Naghavi’s MArch Thesis(BuffaloNY-TMUTehran)
The project is an on-site brick laying technique for parametric walls. A precedent of this research is walls with rotating bricks by Kohler and Gramazio of Zurich ETH. This research is concerned with finding other methods to reproduce the same effect with brick. The considered methods seek to reduce the budget with a certain degree of leniency on precision and also providing on-site fabrication possibility. In other words, it is seeking the strategies toward avoiding surplus precision in the design and fabrication process in order to make the luxurious reachable for a greater society and save the economy. The extent of human-eye ability to distinguish the ambiguity which is called ‘error’ is the focus of the explorations and the drawings. The drawings try to engage in a dialogue with ambiguity from a different perspective. Taken Michiel Riedijk’s “Architecture as a craft”(SUN2010) into account the project tries to perceive architecture as a craft through drawings, and look to drawings as an independent entity/media that may live much longer. A question would be if the project was still presentable if the photos were not there?
Digital fabrication has made an excessive degree of precision available to a great society. However, still a considerable part of building industry functions with a lower precision, and to a certain degree uses the production methods of the last century. In other words, the products -at least in relation with the building industry- that have been made by the use of digital technology may be perceived as a luxury -though it may not be revealed in the first glance- while they don’t necessarily need to. This research -having in mind atoms are the new bits- seeks the digital revolution; the phenomenon many other fields (like product design with DIYs) have gone through relying on open-source. To find the barriers to such revolution and save the economy this research rethinks the role of human and machine in the production process. The result is a professional DIY, A DIY for architects, which is the first most valuable outcome of the project and can be found among the photos.
Another outcome which I am still working on is a 10 pages long kind of article which only contains 19 quotations some selected from my master Thesis, which are result of using Francesca Hughes' "Architecture of Error"(MITpress2014) as a starting point and looking to other disciplines including translation studies, cultural studies and humanities, etc. texts to rethink and seek the costs, boundaries and cures of mostly invisible phenomenon called precision fetishism in architecture.
In search of a strategy against the domination of the more precise which Hughes asks about in her book, the relation to technology thus culture and craft needs to be reconsidered. With focus on this relation I have tried to create a matrix of already existing written data in a desired order to try to create a meaningful composition which contains the answer in different layers like an onion! I have looked at writing in a maybe Grasshopper-ish way and made a remix of writings maybe. They include concepts about Technology, Craft, Architecture in relation with Translation, Translation studies, Error, Precision, Hybrids, Cyborg, DIY and Economy in relation with architecture to rethink or start an on-going reconsideration of our relation with Technology for the sake of economy.
To hire such a strategy against precision the most precise has been pushed one level back from the final product and created the other important outcome which would potentially live longer than the others, the stencils, the approximatory bridges hired to make the project possible on its very tight budget. The technology costs are not considerable, just the laser cut for the stencils. And they are available as a product on my website, and obviously various patterns can easily be produced relying on Grasshopper. The grasshopper code is in a way the simplest possible code on ever. It just rotates the bricks in a domain of a 9-27 based on their distance from a surface modeled in rhino, quite straight forward.

For complete information please visit my website, you can find the article, the DIY, and the project @ sstudiomm.wordpress.com

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