Negotiated materialization: Design approaches integrating wood heterogeneity through advanced robotic fabrication

Whilst robots are predictable, repetitive, predefined and constant, natural materials present unpredictable complexity. Over the past few centuries, materials have been standardized to fit industrial processes, in an attempt to defy this unpredictability. Thanks to new advances in sensing technologies and computational design, today we have the opportunity to reintegrate the intrinsic properties of natural materials in their full complexity. What is the potential of a synthesis between the particularity of each specific material element—specific properties and parameters—informing the fabrication process? Digital and Robotic Fabrication are based on the use of flexible machines that open the possibility to mass-customize the production process. Combined with sensors and computational analysis, they allow to work with “soft systems”, both adaptable and continuously evolving, whose dynamism is constantly fed by a flow of information. How can the designer integrate this uncertainty and complexity in the design process? In this paper the authors specifically discuss the management of structural and material tolerance inherent to large scale construction and anisotropic materials, such as wood. A series of projects developed and built at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and the Bartlett School of Architecture are used as case studies to investigate tolerance management in Digital Fabrication with different kinds of wood.