New Open-Access Books Launched – FABRICATE 2020 and Design Transactions

The two publications, Design Transactions and FABRICATE 2020 are now available to access as free downloads via the UCL Press website and can be ordered in full-colour print from UCL Press online. 

Design Transactions: Rethinking Information Modelling for a New Material Age

Editors: Bob Sheil, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Martin Tamke and Sean Hanna 

Design Transactions brings together research from participants in an EU-funded Horizon 2020 Training Network, Innochain, which includes a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. This highly illustrated publication features work from all 15 early-stage researchers supported by Innochain, alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics. 

The book challenges established building cultures and systems through emerging research in design for architecture, engineering, and construction. It offers sustainable and materially smart design solutions that have a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. 

Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions considers the various digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement and investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. 

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FABRICATE 2020: Making Resilient Architecture

Editors: Jane Burry, Jenny E. Sabin, Bob Sheil and Marilena Skavara 

FABRICATE 2020: Making Resilient Architecture is the fourth volume in a triennial series of conference publications that began with Making Digital Architecture in 2011 at The Bartlett School of Architecture. This edition focuses on how we design and make resilient architecture within the context of global challenges and features the work of designers, engineers and makers within architecture, construction, engineering, computation and manufacturing.

Through case studies of completed buildings, analyses of works-in-progress, the latest research in design and digital manufacturing and interviews with leading thinkers, FABRICATE 2020 engages with the key challenges that the built environment currently faces in this extraordinary time.

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Editors 

Bob Sheil

Bob Sheil is Professor in Architecture and Design through Production at The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and has been Director of School since 2014. He is the author of multiple book chapters, refereed papers, and articles on design, making and technology. He has co-designed and built six artefacts/built works, and his work has been exhibited internationally on eleven occasions. He is a Co-Founder of the FABRICATE conference and book for which he was Co-Chair and Co-Editor in 2011 (London) and 2017 (Zurich) and Co-Editor in 2020 (London).

Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen is a Professor of Digital Technologies and leader of the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her research examines how computation is changing the material cultures of architecture in 2016 she was awarded the Elite Research Prize for outstanding researchers under 45 years of international excellence by the Danish Ministry for Higher Education and Science. In 2018 she was appointed General Reporter for the UIA2023 world congress ‘Sustainable Futures’.

Martin Tamke

Martin Tamke is Associate Professor at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture in Copenhagen. He is pursuing design-led research in the interface and implications of computational design and its materialisation. His current work has strong interdisciplinary links to computer science, structural engineering and material science. Currently he is involved in Exskallerate and Innochain, as well as the Danish project Predictive Response and the industrial collaboration Precision Partners.

Sean Hanna

Sean Hanna is Reader in Space and Adaptive Architectures at The Bartlett School of Architecture, and a member of the UCL Space Syntax Laboratory. His research includes the development of computational methods for dealing with complexity in design and the built environment, including the comparative modelling of space and the use of machine learning and optimisation techniques for the design and fabrication of structures. He has written more than 100 academic publications, which address the fields of spatial modelling, machine intelligence and collaborative creativity, and his work has been featured in The Architects’ Journal and The Economist.

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, (T&H, 2010), editor of Designing the Dynamic, (Melbourne Books, 2013) and co-author of Prototyping for Architects, (T&H 2016). Jane has practiced and taught internationally and was a project architect in the technical office at Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família Basilica, with partner Mark Burry. Her recent funded research explores the opportunities for leveraging digital fabrication with simulation and feedback to create better, more sensitive, human-centric spaces.

Jenny E. Sabin

Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer whose work investigates the intersections of architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures. She is the Wiesenberger Associate Professor in Design and Emerging Technologies at Cornell University, the Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP, and Principal of Jenny Sabin Studio in Ithaca. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at the FRAC Centre, Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial and, most recently, as part of Imprimer Le Monde at the Pompidou. Her most recent book LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones was published in 2017.

Marilena Skavara

Marilena Skavara is a London-based architect and interaction designer. She is a co-founder and partner at Codica Ltd., a digital product design practice focused on outcome-driven innovation. She has led and contributed to projects for Mercedes Benz, UCL, M&S, HM Government and several leading start-ups in fintech, automotive, AI, health, fem-tech and media. She has also been involved in social impact projects for non-profit in the US, UK and EU. She has delivered physical computing workshops for The Bartlett and the Architectural Association (AA) in London, Ecole Speciale d' Architecture in Paris, and other universities in Sweden and Denmark. Marilena is one of the founding members of FABRICATE.

Lead image: Coreless filament winding, a digital additive manufacturing technology by James Solly, Innochain Early Stage Researcher at ITKE, University of Stuttgart. From Design Transactions, UCL Press, 2020, ©ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart