Future Design: Redrawing the Blueprint for Building
Originally published in the May 2019 issue of San Francisco Magazine.
San Francisco can only skate by on its gingerbread houses for so long. Pretty buildings just don’t cut it anymore. Soon, we’ll expect our architecture to perform for us, play with us and print itself. The birthplace of tech innovation and social movements, the Bay Area is a hub for boundary pushing architectural firms that—using robotics, digital fabrication, 3D printing and other techniques—are reinventing what it means to be a building.
Hell-bent on 3D printing us out of this housing shortage is Emerging Objects, the studio and workshop from co-founders Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael. The MAKE-tank, which specializes in 3D printing architecture and building components, has constructed the Cabin of 3D Printed Curiosities—an inhabitable, weatherproof and watertight structure built almost entirely of organic 3D-printed materials—in a backyard lot in Oakland. From tiles made of Sonoma chardonnay grape skins to bioplastic interior cladding derived from corn to cups made of recycled coffee grounds, San Fratello and Rael’s experimentation with upcycling local materials for construction could have global implications.
Exploring the digital fabrication frontier is Andrew Kudless, an associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts and founder of Matsys, an Oakland-based design firm hyperfocused on digital fabrication. Matsys’ design for Confluence Park, an outdoor education center in San Antonio, took home the 2019 AIA award for architecture with partner Lake | Flato. Drawing inspiration from plants that funnel rainwater to their roots, the pavilion’s 28 petal-inspired concrete structures stand 26 feet high, provide shade from the Texas sun and collect rainwater for an underground cistern. In the project’s infancy, Matsys used small powder-based 3D printers for prototyping. Later, the firm partnered with pioneering fabrication company Kresyler & Associates—which you can thank for SFMOMA’s new facade—to make Fiberglass composite molds that were shipped to Texas to cast the pavilion’s “petals.” Producing the molds in California with Kreysler, Kudless notes, enabled his firm to “make the form work at a much higher level of accuracy and lower cost than traditional wooden formwork.”
In addition to the open road of concrete fabrication, Kudless is also exploring “digital craft,” applying digital tools like 3D printing to traditional materials like clay. “It’s interesting combining one of the oldest materials humans have used with some of the newest technologies we have developed,” he says. “Digital fabrication allows me to explore materials in new ways and to create things that wouldn’t be possible without it.”
Nataly Gattegno of FUTUREFORMS says she and partner Jason Kelly Johnson’s work has been called “high-perfromance craft,” but we’re not convinced it’s not sheer sorcery. If you strolled by the lobby of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 2014-16, you may have noticed something following you: LED lights. Coupling sound and movement sensors with a swarming algorithm that directed LEDS to move and intensify, project Lightswarm seemed to flirt with its environment. For an early morning tai chi group, it dispatched smooth, relaxing auroras of light; for bike-riding passersby in the afternoon, it emitted more furtive signals.
At Milan’s Salone del Mobile design week last spring, FUTUREFORMS unveiled a LED-lit wall that harvested social media trends to inform its tempo, color, and even texture. Recently installed to a railway underpass in D.C. is project Lightweave, a 400-foot-long outdoor interactive chandelier, which is triggered by vibration and motion above and below it. The San Francisco firm is also researching kinetic surfaces that shape-shift, as well as 3D printing “spider robots” that could enable printing buildings like a spinning web. Hello supernatural, so long brick-and-mortar.
