Zach Seibold

This course explores how new techniques in digital form-making, fabrication and representation can facilitate new ways of thinking about architecture. Of particular interest are the ways in which technology can influence how we design, describe, represent, fabricate, and interact with built form. Produced during the Fall 2019 semester, the work explores this landscape via two disparate digitally controlled processes - robotic hot wire cutting and projection mapping. The work is conceptually grounded by the term manipulation, a word which can refer to the skillful handling or operation of something, but also connote more deceitful ambitions of obfuscation or alteration. The work presented seeks to leverage this ambiguity as a site of productive tension. Columns have historically been a site for the deployment of rule-based formal logics and systems of ornamentation from Alberti to Louis Sullivan to Michael Hansmeyer. In the context of our work, it is an opportunity to develop form algorithmically and explore the range of design outcomes that emerge from the manipulation of parameters. As these different approaches play into different epistemic questions about architecture, the work produced during the course explores new possibilities of feedback between the physical and digital worlds. This allows the conception of a variable architecture, capable of representing not only finished shapes but the very conditions of formalization and the embodiment of invisibles. The lines between three-dimensional objects and digital creations blur as projections alter architecture in real time. The projection mapping projects create a liminal zone between real and virtual space, and question the relationship between perception and representation. Here, design is manifested in a dynamic environment of forces, in which form and matter can be manipulated by ever-moving, ever-changing sets of data and digital information. Student work produced as part of a course at the Harvard GSD developed + taught by Zach Seibold + Hyojin Kwon