Retsin, G; (2020) Fresh from the forest: Raw, discrete and fully automated. In: Ojari, A and Karine, K and Soolep, J, (eds.) Proceedings of the Space And Digital Reality: Ideas, Representations/Applications and Fabrication. (pp. pp. 102-113). Estonian Academy of Arts: Tallinn, Estonia.

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Abstract

Emerging new platforms combine timber with automation, prefabrication and end-toend integration in an attempt to disrupt the construction industry. While these efforts contribute to the renewal of an often outdated industry and have the potential to contribute to a more ecologically responsible built environment, there are also a number of potential risks attached to their centralised approach to automation. Although architecture has a long history of engagement with digital technologies, it has yet to fully understand and theorise the rapid changes implied by automation and the digital economy which underlie these new platforms. This paper proposes to shift from the notions of "digital design" and "digital fabrication" to the notion of automation, to emphasise the social, political and economic implications of digital technologies. A framework of automation moreover allows us to connect with aspects of the digital economy, which is arguably the aspect of the digital that most significantly impacts the world and our cities. On an architectural level, it draws a historic continuity with mechanisation, bypassing postmodernism and the early digital's dialectic relation with the modernist project. The work presented in this paper acknowledges the new timber platforms argument for timber as a material with disruptive capacities. Timber currently already has a high degree of automation throughout its entire production chain. Forests are managed digitally, continuously responding to the global demands and logistics of sustainable timber production. However, the paper proposes an alternative, distributed and more open-ended framework for timber platforms, based on the combination of discrete architectural parts with automation. This so-called discrete paradigm builds on a computational understanding of parts as function agnostic, serialised building blocks that can be digitally assembled into functional buildings. These building blocks are manufactured by the computer-controlled processing of widely available, two-dimensional base materials such as plywood or mass-timber sheets. Projects such as the Tallinn Architecture Biennale Installation (2017) and the Nuremberg Concert Hall (2018) explore this context of automated discrete timber and its architectural, technical and economic consequences for the production of housing and the building industry at large.

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