Model Translations - Studies of translations between physical and digital architectural models

Abstract

With the rise of the digital in architecture and the availability of digital fabrication tools, the interest in the material aspect of the model has intensified. At the same time, the design space for exploration of material behavior and its design potential has been extended from the physical into the digital. This has resulted in a cyclic set of translations from the physical realm into the digital by means of mathematical descriptions and back from the digital realm into the physical by means of digitally controlled fabrication processes. Despite the availability of more and more computational power and improvement of precision in simulation, these translations from the physical into the digital and vice versa can never be exact (Eco 2006), the translations from the physical model into a digital model and from the digital into the physical are spaces of (Evans 2000). The current paper explores in more detail this space of instability between physical and digital models, its potential for architectural design, and the central role of the mathematical description in this reciprocal set of translations.