Digitizing David

3D printing is making it drastically easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A replica of Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle. While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet reached the ubiquity of the home printer. But it will. A recent trip to the Makerbot store, a 3D printing boutique in Manhattan, has absolutely convinced that “desktop” 3D printing is poised to change the world. I saw nine-year-old kids using basic CAD software to make their own toys. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near-future where toys are downloaded like books or songs or movies. Print-on-demand custom lego bricks or minifigs are the kinds of things I would have dreamt about as a child if I could have even imagined the possibility. It’s only a matter of time until desktop fabrication is as common as desktop publishing. The technology is getting cheaper and more efficient every year.

These latest drawing and modeling technologies are fascinating, but I recently decided to do a little digging into the history of “3D Printing” for Smithsonian’s Design Decoded blog and learned that the earliest fabrication “machines” actually date all the way back to the Renaissance, to a man who invented digital reproduction in the truest sense of the word. Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian philosopher, scientist, architect and all around polymath who lived during the 15th century. The prototypical Renaissance man, Alberti is perhaps one of the most important and influential creative figures to come out of the era. It’s a travesty that he’s not popularly known. Alberti essentially invented architectural notation and thus, the very idea of the architect (although some might argue for Brunelleschi). He believed that art and science were united by basic principles of mathematics, and among his many accomplishments he also invented techniques for producing identical copies of paintings, sculptures, and even buildings without the aid of mechanical devices such as the printing press. This desire for a method of creating identical copies came out of Alberti’s frustration with the inadequacies and inevitable mistakes that result from manual reproduction techniques. In his excellent book, The Alphabet and The Algorithm, architectural theorist and historian Mario Carpo describes these techniques as “digital” reproductions:

“Alberti tried to counter the failings of analog images by digitizing them, in the etymological sense: replacing pictures with a list of numbers and a set of computation instructions, or algorithms, designed to convert a visual image into a digital file and then recreate a copy of the original picture when needed.”

By reducing images to carefully calculated coordinates and documenting the method by which the original was created, Alberti ensured that anyone could produce copies that were exactly identical to his original work. The numeric manuscripts, which were easy to copy without error, represented a type of Renaissance era file transfer.

left: An illustration of Alberti’s finitorium in use. right: David being digitally scanned by Stanford Labs

The most impressive of these techniques describes a method for accurately copying a statue. In his treatise on figural sculpture, De statua, Alberti described a method of reproducing identical copies of sculptures using traditional tools and basic computation. First, the artist/copier takes precise measures of the sculpture’s height, width and its various diameters using the proper tools – t-squares, angles, etc. The main components of the sculpture are measured and documented numerically —“scanned,” if you will—in relation to one another and to the entire length of the statue. To get more precise measurements of the statue’s details, a device of Alberti’s invention known as the definitor or finitorium is installed atop the statue. The finitorium is a flat disc inscribed with degrees joined to a movable arm, also inscribed with measurements; from the end hangs a weighted line. By rotating the arm and raising or lowering the plumb line, it is technically possible, although surely infuriatingly slow, to map every single point on the statue in three-dimensional space relative to its central axis. That data could then be sent to a craftsman who would use it to create an identical copy of the original statue. Or, it could be sent to craftsmen who each create a portion of the original statue. Using Alberti’s method of “digitization” these individual components could even be fabricated in different cities and seamlessly assembled to create an exact replica of the original—a process that sounds a lot like modern manufacturing.

The Makerbot Replicator 2

This brings us back to 3D printing. There are many different kinds of 3D printers that create models from various types of plastic, but they all essentially work the same. The printer processes digital blueprints—coordinates located in virtual space—of an object created by modeling software and digitally “slices” the model into pieces small enough to be created by the machine. These components are layered on top of one another in incredibly small increments and are bound together almost seamlessly, creating an identical physical reproduction of the original digital model. 3D scanning and printing is obviously much, much faster than Alberti’s method, but it functions in much the same way—except, of course, for the automated documentation of an object’s shape and the robotic construction using synthetic materials.

A copy of Michelangelo’s David created with the Makerbot Replicator 2. (via Google Groups)

With both the old and new technologies, any statue—any thing, really—can be theoretically recreated at any size anywhere. Take, for instance, Michelangelo’s David. In 2000, Stanford labs created a digital 3D copy of the David that art “users” can rotate and manipulate to examine the sculpture in much closer detail than would be possible if they were to visit the original in Florence. In 2009 Stanford made drastic improvements to their earlier model with a full-resolution (1/4mm) 3D model of Michelangelo’s 5-meter statue that contains nearly 1 billion polygons. It may be the largest existing digital model of a scanned object. From six tons to thirty-two gigabytes, the digitized replica of Michelangelo’s masterpiece can now be reconstituted in the studio of anyone with a high-speed internet connection, enough hard drive space, and a Makerbot. The flexibility afforded by the digital model creates entirely new ways for people to experience the statue. See the above image for one such example. At a much larger scale is the enormous golden reproduction known formally as David (inspired by Michelangelo), which was created in 2005 by conceptual artist Serkan Ozkaya and is currently installed in the 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

3D printers and other forms of digital fabrication will change the way we live. But the ideas behind these paradigm-shifting machines have been around for a long time, and the dream of sharing and creating identical copies dates all the way back to the 15th century. Scientists, artists and philosophers like Alberti lacked the technological sophistication to make their ideas practical, and, in some cases, they lacked the imagination to even realize the possibilities of what they proposed. But that’s no longer a problem. We have the technology. And the designers of tomorrow –perhaps even the children of today– will realize the dreams of the Renaissance.

Continued Reading:

• Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance? [Design Decoded]
• David Leaves Its Site to be Received in a Manhattan Traffic Jam [LWB]
• The Alphabet and The Algorithm by Mario Carpo

Life Without Buildings

The author in free fall.

I recently went skydiving for the first time. It was amazing. Possibly the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done in my life. Before the actual jump, there was the half hour ride in a tiny Cessna aircraft that unfortunately gave me plenty of time to think and overthink about the incredibly complex device I was strapped into and the 18-year-old skydiving intern who I saw preparing it earlier in the day. As we climbed higher and higher to the proper altitude, I couldn’t help but stare out the tiny open window, toward the small island that seemed to be descending from me like a Google maps zoom-out. There was no doubt in my mind that the jump would be exciting  but contrary to the teenager’s claims, I felt like it was I who was going to be totally sick, bro. While trying to make reassuring small talk with the perfect stranger to whom I was about to attach myself and leap out of an airplane, I learned that his pack not only had a backup chute, but a backup ripcord, and a backup backup in the form an onboard computer that would release the parachute should he lose consciousness. I felt better. I don’t think I’m alone in trusting a computer more than a teenager. The jump went perfectly: I shouted the obligatory “GERONIMO!” and leapt into the void. It was truly awesome. That is, it actually filled me with awe. The experience didn’t feel so much like falling as it did floating. I was just suspended in air, looking over a beautiful island in the Caribbean. Once I took that first step out of the airplane, there was no worrying about backpacks or parachutes or Google maps or even safe landings. It was just so peaceful. A couple days later, once I had time to process everything, my thoughts returned to that backpack. Whose insane idea was that? Who was the inventor that made it possible for me to survive a fall of 10,000 feet? Some quick research told that that I owed my life to a Russian actor named Gleb Kotelnikov, who created the first parachute more than 100 years ago.

[read the early history of the parachute at Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

Gramazio & Kohler, Flight Assembled Architecdture, FRAC Centre in Orléans, France, 2011-2012                               (image: François Lauginie via Gramazio & Kohler)

Drones can’t just destroy, they can build. Although the military uses of drones are widely debated, less discussed are their potentially revolutionary civilian implications. They aren’t yet widespread, but drones are being used by hobbyists, photographers, farmers, ranchers, and they may even herald an entirely new type of architecture. Last year, Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, in collaboration with Raffaello D’Andrea, developed “Flight Assembled Architecture” – an experimental concept structure that employed small, unmanned aerial vehicles programmed to build.

Created as an installation for the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France in early 2012, the project models a speculative construction system that integrates robotics, digital fabrication, engineering, and design. Several small robotic “quadrocopters” lift 1,500 foam blocks into a complex cylindrical tower standing more than six meters high. The tower is a model for a speculative future habitat that would stand more than 600 meters tall and house 30,000 inhabitants. It makes sense to illustrate such a revolutionary concept with a skyscraper – after all, the skyscraper wouldn’t be possible if architects and engineers hadn’t embraced technologies such as steel construction and elevators. Construction drones are the bleeding edge of speculative building technology and they’re perfectly designed to create high-rise buildings in urban areas where construction can be incredibly difficult and costly. As Kohler noted in an essay for the architectural journal Log, “the conditions of aerial robotic construction are entirely liberated from the bottom-up accessibility of material, man, or [existing] machine.” These robots can create buildings without erecting scaffolding or using cranes. Drone-built designs aren’t beholden to current construction limitations and their use opens up a new possibility of architectural forms.

[continue reading on Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

The Kettering “Bug” (image: The United States Air Force)

Military aviation was born during the years preceding the World War I, but once the war began, the industry exploded. Barely more than a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully completed the first documented flight in history –achieving only 12 seconds of air time and traveling 120 feet– hundreds of different airplanes could be seen dogfighting the skies above Europe. Mastering the sky had changed the face of war. Perhaps due to their distance from the fighting, the United States trailed behind Europe in producing military fliers but by the end of the War, the U.S. Army and Navy had designed and built an entirely new type of aircraft: a plane that didn’t require a pilot.

[continue reading on Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

Robert Venturi’s Duck Hunt

Although there isn’t much original content these days on Life Without Buildings, I’ve been busy writing elsewhere.

Most notably, for almost two years now I’ve been co-writing a book with Robert A.M. Stern documenting the history of the Yale School of Architecture and the contributions its alumni have made to the profession. Working on the book takes up the majority of my time and as arduous as it can sometimes be, the experience has been incredibly rewarding and I’m quite proud of the way it’s shaping up. As part of my research, I’ve conducted more than fifty interviews with former faculty and alumni, including Vincent Scully, Stanley Tigerman, Jaque Robertson, William McDonough, Marion Weiss, and many, many others. This has really been the best part of the process. Almost without exception, these conversations have been absolutely fascinating and I look forward to being able to share these interviews in some form. The book is absolutely massive and although it should be finished this year, it likely won’t be released to coincide with the Centennial of the Yale School of Architecture in 2016.

Most of my blogging these days happens over at Smithsonian’s Design Decoded, where I write about the design histories of everyday objects like espresso machines and drones, as well as pop-culture icons like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. Please check it out!

The most recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education includes my review of last year’s “Reconsidering Postmodernism” symposium.  If you have any interest in Postmodernism, the entire issue offers a lot of insight on the movement/style/concept that, in my opinion, is more relevant now than ever. My review focuses on a few of the younger architects and historians who are offering fascinating new perspectives on Postmodernism and sometimes even writing entirely new histories. I hope to post an excerpt soon.

In the February issue of Wired I’ve contributed a fun piece about Die Hard examining the connection between John McClane’s personal relationships and his penchant for mayhem.

The February issue of Smithsonian includes an aritcle I wrote about new research into the origins of rocketry. Spoiler: early alchemists weren’t exactly rocket scientists. And their work frequently blew up in their face – literally.

Coming up, look for my piece in the next issue of Soiled on slapstick comedy and Expressionist utopias. Thanks to everyone who helped successfully kickstart the issue so the editors can put together an even more impressive print run.

And finally, I was on a recent episode of NPR’s “How to Do Everything” podcast talking about the design of the Presidential Seal.

That’s it for now. Back to work.

Life Without Buildings

Shura City (image: Asher J. Kohn)

As drones become increasingly common tools of war and surveillance on the battlefield and in our cities, how are architects and designers responding? Previously, we’ve looked at personal counter-surveillance measures, but it’s likely that future designers will move beyond the scale of the individual to larger projects such as drone-proof architecture or perhaps even urban-scale counter-surveillance. Concerned about what he sees as the improper or unjustified use of drones, law student Asher J. Kohn has imagined how an anti-drone city might look and function. This isn’t a science fiction [cscenario, but a seriously considered urban design strategy. In fact, considering that the speculative plan for what Kohn has named “Shura City” is designed to counter the most technologically sophisticated weapons ever developed, the proposal is surprisingly low-tech.

Life Without Buildings

Installation view of The Art of the Scent exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in New York.                          (original image: Brad Farwell)

While walking through the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition “The Art of the Scent (1889-2012)” my mind was flooded with memories of a nearly forgotten childhood friend, an ex-girlfriend and my deceased grandmother. It was a surprisingly powerful and complex experience, particularly because it was evoked in a nearly empty gallery by an invisible art form—scent. It’s often cited that smell is the sense most associated with memory (both are processed by the brain’s limbic system), and the iconic fragrances exhibited in “The Art of the Scent” are likely to take visitors on their own private jaunts down memory lane. But it might not lead where they expect.

Like any art form or design discipline, the creation of a scent is the result of experimentation and innovation. Yet, perfume and cologne are rarely appreciated as the artfully crafted designs they are. “The Art of the Scent” is the first major museum exhibition to recognize and celebrate scent as a true artistic medium rather than just a consumer product. The 12 exhibited fragrances, chosen by curator Chandler Burr to represent the major aesthetic schools of scent design, include Ernest Beaux’s Modernist Chanel No.5 (1921); the Postmodern Drakkar Noir (1982) by Pierre Wargnye ; and Daniela Andrier’s deconstructed fragrance Untitled (2010). Perhaps most significantly, the exhibition begins with the first fragrance to incorporate synthetic raw materials instead of an exclusively natural palette, thereby truly transforming scent into an art: Jicky (1889), created by Aimé Guerlain. Unfortunately, this fragrant historiography will initially be lost on the average visitor because while scent may indeed be the best sense for provoking memory, it is the worst sense for conveying intellectual content. When we smell something—good or bad—our reaction is typically an automatic or emotional response. Such a reaction doesn’t lend itself particularly well to critical analysis. The greatest challenge facing Burr, who wrote the “Scent Notes” column for the New York Times and the book  The Emperor of Scent, was to get visitors to move beyond their initial emotional responses and memories and to think critically about scent design. And the greatest challenge facing exhibition designers Diller Scofidio + Renfro was to figure out how to present an invisible art.

 [continue reading on Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

Patent #3,285,228, The Fisher Anti-Gravity Pen (image: Google patents)

The following post is excerpted from Design Decoded.

The Fisher Space Pen was created by inventor, pen manufacturer, and (brief) JFK political opponent Paul C. Fisher. Fisher had been an innovator in the pen industry for years, even before he started his own company. His mastery of the ballpoint pen can be attributed in part to his experience working with ball bearings in a airplane propeller factory during World War II. Fisher also invented the “universal refill” ink cartridge, ultimately leading him to create the very first “Anti-Gravity” pen, the AG7, which was patented in 1966 and famously used by astronauts during the Apollo space missions. However, it’s a popular misconception that NASA invested millions of dollars into the development of the zero-gravity writing instrument. They didn’t. Nor did the space agency approach Fisher to develop a pen for use by American astronauts. According to a 2006 piece in Scientific American, the truth is that Fisher had been working on the design for years and had invested $1 million into the pen’s development. But Fisher wasn’t dreaming of astronauts writing postcards from Earth orbit, he was just looking to make a good pen that worked without leaking. After years of research and prototypes, he created what he believed to be the perfect pen – a pen with ink that wasn’t exposed to air and didn’t rely on gravity so it wouldn’t leak or dry up; a pen that could write underwater and function at temperatures ranging from -30 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Fisher’s breakthrough was perfectly timed with the space race and he offered the pens to NASA for consideration. After two years of testing, it was approved and Fisher’s pen accompanied Apollo 7 astronauts into space.

[continue reading on Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

Thomas Jefferson’s “polygraph” device. Today it would be more properly called a pantograph – a tool traditionally used by draftsmen and scientists to reduce and enlarge drawings.

The following post is excerpted from Design Decoded.

President Obama was in Hawaii when he signed the fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C. Of course, it’s now common for us to send digital signatures back and forth every day, but the President of the United States doesn’t just have his signature saved as a JPEG file like the rest of us lowly remote signatories. Instead, he uses the wonder that is the autopen – a device descended from one of the gizmos in Thomas Jefferson’s White House.

A precursor of sorts to the  autopen, the polygraph, was first patented in 1803 by John Isaac Hawkins and, within a year, was being used by noted early adopter Thomas Jefferson. Known formally as the “Hawkins & Peale’s Patent Polygraph No. 57,” this early copy device was used by Jefferson to make single reproductions of documents as he was writing them. Though obviously less advanced than today’s electronic autopen, and used for a different purpose, the polygraph is similar in that it ultimately created a signature that wasn’t technically written by the President. While both devices are incredibly convenient, they raise a compelling question: is a signature still a signature when it’s not written by hand?

Digital media theorist and architectural historian Mario Carpo has written extensively on the relationship between early reproduction methods and modern digital technologies. In his excellent book, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Carpo notes that ”like all things handmade, a signature is a visually variable sign, hence all signatures made by the same person are more or less different; yet they must also be more or less similar, otherwise they could not be identified. The pattern of recognition is based not on sameness, but on similarity.” That statement may seem obvious, but it’s important. The variability of a signature denotes its authenticity; it reflects the time and place a document was signed, and perhaps even reveals the mood of the signatory. A digital signature, however, has no variability. Each signature –one after another after another– is exactly like the last. Although the modern autopen includes adjustable settings for speed and and pressure, these options are used for practical purposes and variability is only created as a side-effect. Today, the notion of a signature as a unique, identifiable mark created by an individual, is a concept that may be changing. The signature of a historic figure is no longer a reliable verification of authenticity that attests to a specific moment in history, but a legal formality.

[continue reading at Design Decoded]

Life Without Buildings

The Chicago brownstone at the center of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, and a glimpse into the lives within.

Chris Ware’s Building Stories is ostensibly a comic book chronicling the lives of the occupants of a three-story Chicago brownstone. But it’s so much more than that. At once expansive and intimate, it is a masterpiece of storytelling, a fragmentary collection of sad and beautiful vignettes that began more than a decade ago serialized serialized across several popular publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.

If there’s a central theme to Building Stories, it’s the passing of time – and our futile struggle against it. The comic book is the perfect medium to explore this idea. After all, what is a comic but sequential, narrative art? Unlike a photograph, a comic panel does not typically show a single moment in time but is, rather, a visual representation of duration. That duration might be the time it takes Superman to punch out a giant robot or the seconds that pass while a failed artist chops a carrot. The manipulation of time and space and emotion is Ware’s greatest strength. He controls every aspect of the page, how the story is told, and how the story is read, requiring true engagement from the reader. At times, the effect is reminiscent of an Eadweard Muybridge photo sequence – except instead of a running horse, the sequence depicts a young couple struggling through an awkward conversation at the end of a first date.

Every volume, every page, and every panel of Building Stories has been carefully considered and painstakingly designed. Ware’s drawings are often diagrammatic and vaguely architectural; his page layouts read like complex maps of human experience. It must be mentioned that Ware writes and draws everything by hand, giving the book, with its exacting precision, a sense of craftsmanship. And though it’s not always clear what path to follow, every single composition, whether clean or cluttered, has a profound effect on how the text is understood and how it resonates emotionally. Ironically, given the amount of detail in each drawing, Ware might best be described as an impressionist. After all, a Monet painting doesn’t show us exactly what the water lilies looked like, but how it felt to see them.

Life Without Buildings