Refabricating Architecture

Refabricating Architecture is an innovative text that skillfully demonstrates that contemporary architectural instruction is a linear process, in both construction and design, where segregation of intelligence and information has become the norm. Focusing on the idea that preoccupation with image, as well as a failure to look at process, has led entire generations of architectural professionals to overlook transfer technologies and transfer processes, this text will argue that the time has come to reevaluate and update basic design principles and construction methods that have constrained the building industry throughout its history.

The text convinces the reader to look at the shipbuilding, automobile and aerospace industries in order to learn how to incorporate collective intelligence and nonhierarchical production structures. These industries have proven to be progressively efficient, economic, and they yield a higher quality product then the production of buildings throughout the 19th century. This transfer that the authors envision is the complete integration of design with the  craft of assembly supported by material scientists,  production engineers and the process engineer. 175 pages.

Refabricating Architecture - Table of Contents:

• The Process Engineer and the Aesthetics of Architecture
  • Architecture: Art or Commodity?
  • The Hand and the Machine
  • Great Architecture
  • Equation
  • Integration – not Segregation
  • Tools of the Process Engineer
  • An Example: The Car
  • Result: Higher Quality
  • Master Building
• Role Reminders in the New World
  • Architect
  • Contractor
  • Materials Scientist
  • Product Engineer
• Enabling Systems as Regulatory Structure
  • Enabling Communications
  • Information Management/Representation/Organization
  • Communications Examples
• Processes We Do Not See
  • Integrated Component Assembly
  • Modular Assembly
  • Grand Blocks
  • Sectioned Assembly
  • Architecture of the Joint
• Architecture
  • Lessons of Modernism
  • Mass Production
  • Mass Customization
  • Present Realities
  • Transfer Processes
  • Transfer Materials
• Mass Customization of Architecture
  • Evolution
  • Building Blocks
  • Panel Methods
  • Architecture, Not Building
  • Case Study 1: Grand Block Method
  • Case Study 2: Panel Method
• Evolution Not Revolution
  • Evolutionary Architecture
  • How
  • When