FABRICATE returns to The Bartlett School of Architecture

Since its inception, FABRICATE has welcomed hundreds of delegates to conferences in London (2011), Zurich (2014) and Stuttgart (2017), acting as a global forum for the exploration of the radical new opportunities for design in manufacturing, computation, material science and assembly. 

The conference was co-founded by The Bartlett’s Director, Professor Bob Sheil and Design for Performance & Interaction Programme Director Ruairi Glynn. Released just before each conference, three FABRICATE publications have been published since 2011. With 75,000 downloads to date, each book is available to read online.

Fabricate 2020

Taking place within and around the school’s state-of-the-art fabrication, research and teaching facilities at UCL at Here East, FABRICATE 2020 will be co-organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology and Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and will be co-chaired by Jane Burry and Jenny Sabin. 

The conference will address and discuss the opportunities the latest fabrication techniques present for creative construction, from component to building scales. Tickets will go on sale this autumn.

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Find out more about FABRICATE 2020

Call for Work now open 

Deadline for abstracts: 13 June

The call for work for FABRICATE is now open for submissions of built or partially built projects by individuals or collaborators in academia, practice and industry. 

Submission details

The team welcome submissions that examine how the latest digital design and fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, and the many novel techniques being developed to bridge the difficult gap that exists between digital modelling and its realisation.

The first stage submission is light touch, so that practitioners are given the chance to fully write up their papers once they know they have been selected.

The submissions will be reviewed by a panel of experts and those selected will be featured in the FABRICATE publication. The book is published the day before the conference opens, thereby freeing the event for open discussion and dialogue, and a smaller selection of projects will be presented at the conference. 

• Read the submission guidelines

About the FABRICATE 2020 Chairs

Jane Burry

Jane Burry is an architect, professor and Dean of the School of Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. She is lead author of The New Mathematics of Architecture, editor of Designing the Dynamic and co-author of Prototyping for Architects amongst many other publications. 

Jane has practiced and taught internationally, including involvement as a project architect in the technical office at Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família Basilica with her partner Mark Burry. She is co-curator of the 2018 International Exhibition Dynamics of Air.

Jane’s recent research explores the opportunities for leveraging digital fabrication with simulation and feedback to create better, more sensitive, human-centric spaces. 

Jenny Sabin

Jenny Sabin is an architectural designer, whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for architectural practice, investigating the intersections of architecture and science and applying insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures. 

Jenny is the Wiesenberger Associate Professor in design and emerging technologies at Cornell University. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an architectural design studio based in Ithaca, and Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP. 

Jenny’s work has been exhibited at the FRAC Centre, Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and most recently as part of Imprimer Le Monde at the Pompidou Centre. Her book LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones, was published in 2017. This year, Sabin won MoMA & MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program with her submission, Lumen.