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A MIES FOR ALLoffering customized, sustainable, and affordable reproductions of Mies van der Rohe’s classic Farnsworth House.

JUNE 2014

MAKE CLASSIC DESIGNED HOMES AVAILABLE FOR ALL.

“ I have tried to make an archi-tecture that anyone can do.”

--- Mies van der Rohe

CONTENT

01. FARNSWORTH HOUSE

05. PRODUCTION OF HIGH QUALITY DESIGN

07. UNREPEATABLE MODERN ARCHITECTURES

09. CHANGING TIDES

11. PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY

13. METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION

15. FARNSWORTH EVERYWHERE

17. ECONOMICS

21. ADAPTABILITY

23. D.I.PLY: DO-IT-YOURSELF PLYWOOD FARNS- WORTH

27. WHAT’S NEXT?

29. THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF THE MODERN

32. MONEY MIES: NEW BUSINESS MODELS FOR PRACTICE

36. ASSEMBLE AND COMPOSE

40. IMPOSSIBLE TECHNIQUE AND DIGITAL AF- FORDANCES

46. AN ICON FOR EVERYONE

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FARNSWORTH HOUSE

Farnsworth House was designed by Bauhaus architect Mies Van der Rohe in 1945 and is widely considered to be a touchstone of modern architecture.

But the Farnsworth was designed for one person. There are no other Farnsworths. In fact, you can’t even buy a Farnsworth if you wanted to.

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PRODUCTION OF HIGH QUALITY DESIGN

There’s an irony here. The modern movement promised the cheap serial production of high quality design. And while successful for furniture and household products, it never panned out for architecture.

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UNREPEATABLE MODERN ARCHI-TECTURES

In fact, almost all of the modern ‘classics’ are one-offs – too expensive, too tailor-made, too copyrighted, to be realistically repeated.

We believe the tides are changing.

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Open-source culture is making it easier to share and mod-ify construction documents.

CHANGING TIDES

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New digital production techniques – laser cutters, 3D printers, and CNC routers – are making the manufacture of custom parts cheaper and more accessible.

PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY

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WE SEND INFORMATION NOT STUFF!

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Distributed manufacturing networks means that parts can be locally produced – distributed information rather-than parts.

METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION

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These new trends can all be harnessed to make architec-tural reproductions more feasible.

FARNSWORTH EVERYWHERE

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Today, an exact replica of the Farnsworth would be too expensive for most homeowners. We calculated it to cost roughly $884,000.

We want to reduce that to $150,000; within reach of a much broader consumer base.

ECONOMICS

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We also want to make the Farnsworth more adaptable to different climates and situations. Through the modifica-tion of its height and its depth we can optimize it for dif-ferent locations while retaining the essence of its design.

ADAPTABILITY

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Plywood, for instance, is a renewable resource that can be made with extremely low environmental impact, and is globally distributed in an optimized material stream. Digi-tal routing tools, like ShopBot routers, are rapidly trans-forming sheet materials from limited applications such as sheathing or sub-flooring into a raw material for an almost unlimited range of more prominent and efficient roles in assemblies.

We can tap this potential by producing a series of laser-cut plywood pieces that can be assembled to recreate the original shape and design of the Farnsworth house.

D.I.PLY: DO-IT-YOURSELF PLY-WOOD FARNSWORTH

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What’s next? In the near future, A Mies For All will be holding events, conducting research, and broadcasting on the website. A prototype can be expected by end 2014.

WHAT’S NEXT?

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We live in a time when technological progress made the dreams of modern architecture come true. Yet the forms of the 40’s and 50’s that seemed to be initially the result of architecture’s adaptation to the new conditions of production are still mimed indefinitely today, with infinite variations but always within an orthodoxy of shape, volume, texture and even situation, as if nothing has changed.

Most wealthy people today will eventually get their modernist house in the style of Le Courbusier, Neutra or Mies Van Der Rohe, designed by more or less known architects. Their predominantly aesthetic concerns will impose the covering of the structural new materials with noble surfaces that are little in line with the reality of current production.

Inversely, less advantaged people will be confronted to the reality of today’s aesthetics by living in depressingly ugly buildings in which any formal consideration will be subject to the laws of the production costs, the availability of the materials or any other economic imperative of rationalisation.

Even though today some companies propose cheap modernist-like houses on the market, they are in fact nothing less that cheap modernist concepts covered with plasterboard, laminate and veneer. They are forgetting some of the basic legacy of modern architecture like the abandonment of decorum and the acceptance of the aesthetics of the machine produced object.

How come fancy architects still prefer metal and wood over PVC? Why are insulating materials made to be hidden and new multilayered piping systems never used for their formal quality? Why is the modernist spirit of formal innovation still so far away from the commonly high technological produced materials? Why do architects seem to always resist the mass-produced contemporary materials as if the formal quality would suffer from them?

Modern architecture opened up the path for the flow of new industrial materials, yet to-day more than ever, we systematically cover buildings with an exterior cladding, making any old bricks building closer to the ideology of the modern than our newest construc-tions. Even though today, with all the new easily available techniques, it is possible to construct a building that looks like nothing that has been made before, we still want to live in a house that looks like “the new” from 70 years ago.

We are refusing the consequences of the modern thinking while we still want to reach the style of modern architecture. In fact, everything is like if modern life arrived too fast, before we had time to consume its early forms.

By Pierre Bismuth

THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF THE MODERN

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AMFA is addressing this very point.

Why not satisfy this strange desire for the “new” of the past? And if we do accept this nostalgic approach, would it be possible to extract these iconic buildings from their mum-mified historical existence; to reconnect with their initial social, political technological and engineering goal, while still being in tune with today’s economical and market reality.

Today the principles of standardization and democratization that characterized the vision of most of these modern architects seem to be lost even in the most iconic examples of their work. Most of these buildings are not inhabited anymore and have become muse-ums, which gives them the definite status of an ideal - inaccessible dream that legitimises the production of bad copies, endless citations and thus leading eventually to their deg-radation as a model.

This is why our approach here is not at all formal but mainly ideological and structural. We are interested in reviving these historical iconic buildings in their fundamental connection to the social and technological logic of industrial modernity. We want to radicalize and update the application of the modern principles and confront the sacralised formal char-acter they have today. However, in this case the best way to have a non-formal approach is precisely to use the exact same form.

In order to free these buildings from their role as symbolic representations and enable them to finally start functioning socially, AMFA is looking at the possibility to apply the principle of serial production in order to produce them on demand. In this way AMAF ful-fills the modernist project of accessible, mass-produced quality architecture: the value of a unique and authentic modernist design for the price of a standardised building. After all why to live in a mimic of a Mies Van der Rohe while one can live in the original Mies design.

Applying an industrialized fabrication process in serially remaking these houses is a radi-calization of the architect’s vision that becomes possible today thanks to the availability of yet cheaper materials and production processes.

Not least, the concept brings to final fruition the modern project to democratize not only comfortable living conditions but also the most advanced achievements of art and cul-ture. Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Neutra, Gropius, Frank Loyd right, to name a few, all those signature houses become as easily accessible as a new edition of a Barcelona chair or a le Corbusier sofa.

All those iconic buildings will be finally multiplied in site and rightly reproduced as many times as their images had been visible in books and catalogues. All the endless formal variations and derivations will be annihilated by the simple multiplication of the original.

What if our world today imposes its logic of mass production, economy of scale, and standardisation, its pragmatism and its latest technological developments to the very icons of modernism? This is I think the essence of AMFA, a re-appropriation of modern-ism within our contemporary conditions.

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In today’s economic climate we need to re-think how architects provide services and ultimately make their money. Hampered by a slew of chang-ing conditions, the architect’s scope and ability to deliver quality design has greatly diminished. A Mies for All proposes an alternative business model, recasting how the architect’s intelligence and capabilities are deployed. Through a design-led open-source platform we hope to have an unmediated connection with our clients while retaining control of the process, and, with the attachment of compensation to value creation, be accountable for delivering quality.

Mies and his cohort of American mid-century architects offered a very different value proposition to clients than the contemporary practitioner does today. Architects practic-ing now have a value proposition that is limited by their minimal control over project con-struction, with a tenuous connection to clients and end-users. The mid-century American architect, by contrast, had an unmediated connection with the client, retained control of construction, and was solely accountable for delivering quality built architecture. This ac-countability, and the expertise and public regard that accompanied it, were incrementally eroded over the past fifty years. The rise of litigation and shifts in tax policy radically and irreversibly changed the context of how American architects practice, and exacerbated other economic factors that gradually narrowed our professional role. As the architect’s scope has diminished under these conditions, so has the profession’s public standing and its ability to deliver the full value of design and architectural thinking to clients, stakehold-ers, and the public.

Our profession’s self-perception and practice model has barely changed in comparison to how radically the context within which we practice has been transformed. While we certainly can’t change policies and economies to improve our value proposition, , we can change how we practice architecture. A Mies for All proposes another model of practice. It seeks to recast how the architect’s intelligence and capabilities are deployed, so that we can deliver the full value of design, and in the process restore the value proposition for the architect.

As a design-led open source project, A Mies for All offers up architecture that balances mutable open outcomes and successful results. It provides a means for individuals to tai-lor a house to suit their desires, with assurance of performance and function. Achieving such mutability demands a significant front-end design investment on the part of the architectural team. Designing spaces, parts, parameters, interactions, and other essen-tial components that ensure consistently successful outcomes, far exceeds the design

By Anne Filson

MONEY MIES: NEW BUSINESS MODELS FOR PRACTICE

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and construction effort for architecture of equivalent scope. Investment in designing a platform and system, however, pays dividends as ‘Design IP’ that can be opportunisti-cally adapted in ways unachievable by a single design. By amortizing our research and design effort across mass outcomes, rather than one-offs, A Mies for All brings iconic, optimized, holistic design into the realm of economic feasibility for everyday people who desire it.

A Mies for All’s mutable system relies on virtual simulation, digital fabrication, and net-worked manufacturing. It requires the architect to reassert a supervisory role on a next generation job site, which occupies the cloud and the factory, as well as the landscape. By combining this digitally-enabled construction workflow with social networks and e-commerce platforms, A Mies for All bypasses the present-day bureaucracy of construc-tion intermediaries to deliver responsive design and quality construction directly to the many individuals seeking it. This scenario endows the architect with accountability for the architecture and connectivity to the ‘client’ that resembles Mies’ role in the making of his own buildings in America. A Mies for All goes one step further than Mies, however, as it can deliver architecture to everyone, not just the elite.

With a practice model that recoups the architect’s command of the architecture, comes the need for a compatible and sustainable business model. The majority of contemporary American projects are still tied to the fee-for-service cost structure and patronage mod-el, a model that Mies and much of the profession before him employed. While it seems like the natural way to do business, a one-time remuneration for architectural services contributes to our reduced value, as it limits our risks, incentives, and scope in the eyes of the owner. It also has the potential to place the architect’s value in subjective terms in the competitive, red-ocean bidding contest to provide similar services.

By owning Design IP that consists of a body of information, a system, and a platform, A Mies for All isn’t dependent upon a single means of compensation. We can adapt A Mies for All to multiple business models, and opportunistically select the optimal channels for its commercialization and pursue them concurrently, independently, or as a hybrid:

Mass Design

A Mies for All is well suited for the App Economy, with revenue derived from the numer-ous clicks of many individuals rather than the big fee from a single client. Payment is derived from anyone who customizes a Farnsworth online and downloads an individual license for personalized plans and DIY instructions – not unlike how we license iTunes or ebooks. Though more complex, the model works similarly for the just-in-time manufac-turing and full-service delivery of one’s very own Farnsworth, with a menu of additional services for bespoke adaptations or customizations. With a commerce platform in place, increasing scale and volume become essential for maximizing the value from the initial design and research effort. However, unlike a fee-for-service, the number of clicks po-tentially has a limitless return on the initial design and research investment, when the architecture aligns with the desires of many.

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Design / Build / Deliver

Digital manufacturing, e-commerce platforms, and tools for business-to-business net-working all give architects unprecedented resources to pursue entrepreneurial trajecto-ries outside the prevailing paradigms. We’ve started to design and optimize A Mies for All to utilize networks of digital fabricators, pre-existing material streams and readily avail-able e-commerce infrastructure in a way that will maximize value. With the responsibility for the design, manufacturing and delivery of A Mies for All, we bear the consequences of success or failure. However, our ability to control the process enables us to mitigate many of the risks, and increase the chances that we succeed and partake in the rewards that come with success.

Commercial License

The design and design-thinking embodied in A Mies for All can easily be packaged and licensed to a manufacturer, retailer, or distributor. The adaptability of A Mies for All, its online platform, dependence upon ubiquitous materials, and ease of manufacture, offers value to a manufacturing licensee seeking minimal up-front development and investment to serve specific market needs. Licensing the Design IP to a housing manufacturer, for instance, provides us with compensation, without the associated risks and effort of man-ufacturing and delivering a Farnsworth ourselves. We can take compensation as an up front fee and remove all financial risk, assume greater risk and reward by taking royalties for each sale, or find a balance of the two.

Strategic Partnerships

A Mies for All demonstrates DIY culture, digital manufacturing, local economies and de-sign in a way that’s both tangible and comprehensible. For enterprises seeking to develop business affiliations or consumer awareness around housing, self-sufficiency, or manu-facturing innovation, this makes A Mies for All a powerful tool for promoting a strategic marketing or business development agenda. Strategic partnerships can monetize the de-sign thinking and body of knowledge embedded in A Mies for All. Such engagements take the form of specific demonstration installations or ‘product placements’ that opportun-istically affiliate with the A Mies for All brand, or they might take the form of strategic or design consulting that may or may not involve the core project.

We can channel the Design IP produced by A Mies for All through one, several, or all of these models, that best meet demand, investment resources, and the effort and risk we desire. In each scenario, A Mies for All has an unmediated connection with its clients, it retains control of the process, and, with the attachment of compensation to value crea-tion, is accountable for delivering quality. By reclaiming the essential elements for archi-tectural practice, and regaining our value proposition and credibility, we are genuinely ready to fulfill the promise of the modern.

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While most praise for the Farnsworth concerns its formal composition, it is equally skilled in its reduction to a series of assembled parts. While a typical model home from the Sears catalogue consisted of 300,000 pieces, the Farnsworth had just 3,000. Such a fusion of assembly and composition seem ideal for the thinking necessary when working with ad-ditive and subtractive digital fabrication, leading to an architecture that anyone can do.

The idea of assemblage versus composition in architecture is not new. At bottom it seems to imply an attitude regarding materials of construction as being either more or less open to process and procedure, and about how those parts conspire to make a whole.

An architecture of assemblage would seem to reveal its pieces, and in so doing, respect or allow the inherent attributes of the given material to register or participate in the overall reading of the building. For instance, Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus in Bregenz seems to be an architecture purely of assemblage. Unconditioned glass panels of the largest size manufacturable, float and fly by one another as tiles or shingles. The parts are at once whole unto themselves, while simultaneously, their role as part of a larger whole can be clearly understood.

Composition, on the other hand, would seem to require a conditioning of materials in such a way that they become subservient to a larger construct or set of relationships. Frank Gehry comes to mind, where materials are highly processed, and individual components are concealed as a means of prioritizing the larger shape that they conspire to form. Any of Gehry’s titanium projects would work here, where each panel is bent and formed as a constituent in service to the larger shape.

From this description it might be possible to assert that an architecture of assemblage allows the coexistence of multiple material presences to assert themselves in different ways at different times, each understood as a whole in and of themselves. In contradis-tinction, the architecture of composition demands a kind of adherence of components about a conceptual center, each is a part that would not stand alone, but is clearly part of a larger whole.

The Farnsworth house challenges more contemporary architecture that simplistically opts for either one strategy over the other, by oscillating cunningly between the two. While there has been huge attention paid to the proportions that purportedly govern its formal composition, I would argue that there is something more substantial at play.

By Gary Rohrbacher

ASSEMBLE AND COMPOSE

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Mies’ composition of the building into its most elemental pieces, eight columns and two slabs, and their subsequent reduction into their most minimum disposition possible, re-quired unparalleled material intelligence, and exhaustive design labor. One wonders, in this era of starchitecture, if any architect would spend this effort in service of reduction, as opposed to the spectacular. Specifically, a Sears modern home from about the same time as the Farnsworth was made up of some 300,000 pieces. Through exhaustive mate-rial composition Mies reduced the number of pieces that make up the Farnsworth to un-der 3000, and as a result, produced a building that appeared as if it were an architecture of assembly.

The building appeared so convincingly such that Sotheby’s offered to disassemble and re-locate it for the highest bidder when it was up for auction in 2006. The fact is though that welds at the column head and intersection with the floor were structurally required to be nearly 100% efficient, meaning that in reality, vertical and horizontal pieces were more closely one object than several. This in combination with the thousands of plug-welds that make up the facade means that for it to have been moved, would have required the buildings destruction. It would have been easier to reconstruct it.

Rem Koolhaas, in ‘Miestakes’ from 2008, says: “Mies’ fusion of the sublime and the ge-neric into a new hybrid was a form of alchemy, a laboratory experiment that could never be duplicated by others, never be verified.’ That is, until now. A Mies for All senses par-allels in the way that Mies nested the compositional and the assembled into the Farns-worth, and the ways of thinking required of a designer when employing digital design tools, and both additive (3D printing) and subtractive (milling) digital fabrication. A Mies for All wants to realize the democracy and promise fantasized by the modernists in the idea of an architecture of assemblage – and finally achieve Mies’ ‘Architecture that Any-one Can Do.’

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Building a Farnsworth is more complicated than it looks. Behind its ap-parent simplicity is a virtuosic display of building technique guided by a thoughtful engineer, a scrupulous architect and highly skilled crafts-men. With changes in the labor industry and architectural contracts, a traditional re-build of the Farnsworth is virtually impossible. But digital production techniques offer new hope. If we ditch representation for sim-ulation, we can harness new technologies to build the next generation Farnsworth better, faster and for less money than the original.

Among the many extraordinary accomplishments of the Farnsworth, perhaps none has done as much disservice to its legacy as the extent to which Mies made it all appear so effortless. Its handful of easy pieces seem to come together so simply, as if completely inevitable. Because of this perception, historians and theoreticians might be forgiven for concentrating so exclusively on the Farnsworth’s proportions, treating it as a drawing exercise, or as if gravity, materials, and methods were not an issue in the hands of this master. As a consequence, a superficial image of the Farnsworth is perpetuated, while the more interesting story of Mies’ accomplishment as a building technologist is less often discussed.

Few understand or discuss that the extraordinary thinness of the Farnsworth’s roof and floor planes was much more difficult to achieve than it was to draw. This thinness is the result of exhaustive structural calculations by Myron Goldsmith, and a facility with coor-dination and execution of structure, water handling, fire protection, and finish details that are uncommon in the history of architecture, and virtually nonexistent today.

While the Farnsworth’s travertine pavers have been scrutinized geometrically, spatially, and theoretically, their virtual impossibility from the standpoint of construction is typi-cally overlooked entirely. To set a stone floor so precisely on a floating plane, in a flood zone, with freeze-thaw conditions such as those in Plano, requires an uncommonly rigid steel frame and perfectly calculated and executed footings and soil preparation. The fact that the pavers have not shifted from differential movement across footings in over half a century is extraordinary, to say the least.

Dr. Farnsworth’s initial budget for her weekend house was $40,000 in 1949. Construction lasted through 1951, and the building’s final cost was 54% over initial budget (typical of many projects today), ultimately coming in at $73,000. Calculated for inflation only, to build the Farnsworth today should cost somewhere close to $800,000. At just over $500 per square foot, this would make the Farnsworth a somewhat reasonably priced vacation

By Gary Rohrbacher

IMPOSSIBLE TECHNIQUE AND DIGITAL AFFORDANCES

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home. Unfortunately, this calculation does not account for the changes that have oc-curred over the past sixty years in the control that architects have on the job site, and in the availability of highly skilled labor. Given these factors, and the present disposition of the building industry, the idea of replicating the Farnsworth using conventional means is unthinkable, at almost any cost.

For instance, the consolidation of all gravity and wind loads into the eight w-section col-umns of the Farnsworth meant that for all intents and purposes the welds at the column head and floor channel needed to be virtually 100% efficient. At the same time, thou-sands of extremely labor-intensive plug welds contributed to the extreme rigidity of the Farnsworth’s steel frame. Each and every one of these welds had to be ground down to a furniture grade flushness that was then painted white – leaving no trace. Today, archi-tects would not have the authority (and probably not the expertise) to inspect the welds. At the same time, the availability of journeyman and master steel workers has dwindled with the dissolution of labor unions. Finally, if you could find someone who was capable of executing the work, the cost of the time to do it would more than likely make it pro-hibitively expensive.

A Mies For All wants to actually achieve the perceived directness and inevitability of the original Farnsworth, and it will require exploiting the full potentials of today’s new produc-tion techniques, and a complete rethinking of the organization – or entire bypass – of the building industry.

Much like the way that the Farnsworth’s now naturalized simplicity defies its actual weight and construction virtuosity, our present propensity for gravity defying, multi-sun renderings, and parametricized ‘new-form’ has obscured the perhaps more mundane, but at once more radical potentials of emerging digital production techniques. Unfortunately, while these representational and shape-making endeavors seem to be endlessly satisfy-ing to both academic and professional architects alike, together they represent a kind of horseless carriage, where new techniques are still just replacements for, or in service of the old.

As part of our preparation for A Mies for All, our team has generated data rich simula-tions of the Farnsworth that allow forensic analysis and a means to evaluate material and structural optimization, systems integration, thermal performance, assembly techniques, component serviceability, construction logistics, embedded and embodied energy and more. Representations of the building are of course a by-product of this modeling pro-cess, but our focus was to generate a means by which we could understand relationships across and through the construct beyond cause and effect. This simulation process re-veals the multiple roles that each and every component plays in the establishment of the whole, and brings surprising interdependencies into focus. Our modeling allowed us to understand the relationship between the enormous embedded energy in the steel struc-ture relative to the quite small square footage of the building, an enormously inefficient scenario until one recognizes that the steel enables the glass which effectively makes the entire meadow the space of the building.

By looking beyond computation’s remarkable capabilities at predictive representation, and instead modeling to simulate the entire corporeality of the building, we’re going back

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to the future, into the information rich, data driven design environment that existed be-tween Mies, Myron Goldsmith, and their team. When these techniques are combined with virtually direct output through digital prototyping and ultimately CNC fabrication of optimized assemblies, there is the chance that architects might have a chance to re-take the job site and once again make it their own.

A Mies for All is seizing the full potentials of new production techniques, and is focused on disruption of status-quo building industry dysfunction. There should be no reason that a Farnsworth built as well as the original, that is both the image of, and actually something elementary, is not available to everyone at a price they can afford; A Mies For All!

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Until January, in Amsterdam-North, along the road from the ferry to the district, until recently De Kamermaker from DUS Architects could be found. In this small pavilion, as a public project, the 3D printer worked on producing a canal house. Now the printer has moved further, to the construction site. DUS has been working for quite some time on the project, or actually, on the research. Much still needs to be discovered. Innovation in architecture depends, as always, closely on technological development. Therefore, 3D printing, already a quite promising example in the medical field, is such an important new development in architecture. Sometimes it even seems a bit of a hype: successive claims of a new 3D-printed building are tumbling over each other in architecture blogs.

That is not surprising. 3D printing speaks to a wide audience, by bringing invention and production closer together. Like one can produce fun flyers on an inkjet printer, or self-de-signed jewelry on a 3D printer, everyone can now print his own building by himself. The 3D printing democratizes the primacy of the expert and fits in the general tendency in which people are becoming more and more able to co-create their environment themselves. Architects embrace 3D printing and other digital technology for the same commitment to democratization, namely the construction chain. Citizens think: “finally, no longer a need of an architect”; the architect thinks: “finally, no need of contractors or developers.”

Intelligent Modeling

Digital technology has an impact on three aspects; on how teams work, on how architec-ture is simulated, and on the way in which these simulations are made physical through ‘direct prototyping’ and production with computer-driven (CNC) tools.

Digital platforms that facilitate cooperation and manage workflows enable digital models and their associated data to be open to experts, as well as to interest groups and local citizens. Information can be unlocked such that it offers the possibility to involve selec-tive parties to the process at various levels. Through cooperation, mutual influence and through dealing with large amounts of information, more resilient solutions become pos-sible.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is as such evolving into Building Intelligence Mod-eling, where, for example, energy and climate analysis data can be steered with parallel simulations of available manufacturing capacity towards an optimum. Through successive iterations large amounts of data are, step by step, introduced into the design.

Effects design process

The development of digital platforms also has major effects on the development process.

By Matthijs Bouw

AN ICON FOR EVERYONE the architect as a creator of scalable products

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Municipalities can open development for citizens to encourage involvement. The struc-ture of real estate chain, often focused on the institutional lender, large bureaucracies, the landowner and the major contractor, used to take place mostly top-down. Citizens were less involved in their own environment. Digital technology makes it now possible to engage the public better, as a part of the team.

The direct link between 3D modeling and simulation software and the new digital-driv-en devices such as 3D printers, CNC routers and robotics radically changes the design process. Architects, engineers and other potential users evaluate variations of propos-als based on their own expertise, while at the same time they benefit from collaborative analysis and evaluation. This makes the design process more agile and effective than it has ever been in history. At the same time it offers the possibility of making physical proto-types and of unprecedented communication capabilities with stakeholders. By prototyp-ing the risk in the actual construction is limited.

Sometimes the interest in 3D printing distracts from the broader possibilities of digital technology, in particular regarding the production. Here are the most promising digital fabrication technologies are actually CNC routers and robotics.

Jelle Feringa, from EZCT Architecture & Design Research, a Paris agency involved in many experiments with digital technology, puts it this way: “There are additive and subtractive technologies. In additive technology you use an expensive material that is put together layer by layer by the 3D printer into an almost baroque whole. In subtractive technology you use the robot or computer-controlled cutting and drilling with a CNC-router on cheap material, such as eps or plywood, making complex compound shapes or molds. The molds can then again be filled with a low-priced material such as concrete. Subtractive technol-ogy is currently making much more sense from the perspective of production technology: mass-production for what can be mass-produced, customization of what one wants to customize.”

Feringa developed the technology of wire-cutting with the help of industrial robots. Odico Formwork Robotics - a Danish start-up based on Feringa’s technology - produces eps-shapes using large, robust and relatively cheap industrial robots. The approach is compat-ible with existing technologies, and lends itself in particular for the production of complex shaped concrete formwork.

In Odense, Odico uses robots on 25 meter long tracks such that in a morning hundred cubic meters formwork can be produced. Odico produces for a Danish prefeb concrete industry (Hi-Con, Spaencom, Dalton) and for the cleantech industry (Siemens Wind Pow-er).

Promise of mass-production

Mass customization and the ability to set up a new kind of company on the basis of this is the background of A Mies for All. A Mies for All is a company committed to digital technol-ogy in order to make the iconic houses of the Modern movement, such as the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, available to many people.

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A Mies for All wants the houses of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Neutra, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few, to be as easily accessible to the general public as a new edition of the Barcelona Chair or Le Corbusier sofa. A Mies for All wants to deliver on the unfulfilled promise that is the foundation of the modern architecture: the promise of mass production and maximum efficiency through the use of modern technology.

The original vision of standardization and democratization that modern architects ad-hered to seems to have disappeared even in the most iconic examples of their work, such as the Farnsworth House. Most are not occupied, or function as museums. They have been given the final status of an ideal, as an inaccessible dream that produces bad copies and that legitimizes endless quotations. Ultimately, this leads to a degradation from the original idea to a badly copied model.

Many wealthy people today have a modernist house in the style of Le Corbusier, Neutra and Mies Van Der Rohe, designed by more or less well-known architects. One could, given the ease with which architects quote colleagues, say that the architecture is ‘open source’ par excellence! The thing that is striking, though, is that they are built in a traditional way with old techniques and materials. Mass production and new technology can especially be seen in the construction for poor people, in which formal appearance is made subservient to the regularity of production, the availability of the material or just any other economic imperative to rationalize.

A Mies for All wants to perfect the modernist project of accessible, mass-produced, qual-ity architecture. It wants to bring the quality of a unique and authentic modernist design for the price of a standard building. Why would you want to live in a mimicked Mies van der Rohe (or Frank Lloyd Wright) if you can live in the original design of Mies (or Wright)?

Innovations

By applying contemporary digital processes to these houses, one sees a radicalization of the vision of the architect. Mies van der Rohe in 1964 said: “I’ve tried to make an archi-tecture that everybody can do.”

A Mies for All uses digital technology such that the traditional role of the architect can renew itself in the areas of software, technology, manufacturing and distribution.

Specially written parametric software makes it possible to optimize energy and materials. The composition, the height and width ratio of a building can be adapted to the situation and the location. The entire original design has been put in BIM, so that 2083 parts can be considered separately based on, for example, costs of production and transport, or on their ecological footprint. It allows individuals to look for alternatives by part, or by loca-tion. ‘Apps’ and an Internet forum involve interested people in the project, to see what has changed and can be improved, and to solicit contributions from other experts.

The Farnsworth House is originally built on the basis of an exceptionally high degree of workmanship, in a very laborious manner. For example, first the steel parts with bolts and nuts are attached to each other. Then they are welded, and then the bolts are buffed and sanded. Such production is unthinkable at this time.

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Because the goal of A Mies of Allis to build a simpler Farnsworth, a production method has for instance been developed for a CNC-controlled wood version of the House. With the help of the computer, the whole building is exploded into patterns for plywood with a minimum of different parts and the most efficient use of plates. The plate thickness is adaptable in the program, so it works both in the U.S. and in Europe. After delivering the patterns to your local computer-controlled router, the construction package can be picked up after a short time. In this new version of Farnsworth, the energy efficiency in particular, both in terms of production and of its use, is greatly improved compared to the original one.

Method of distribution

In addition to writing software and developing new (mass) production methods, there is a new domain in which the architect himself develops from a designer of unique pieces to a creator of scalable products: the method of distribution.

Digital technology makes it possible for the production to take place as close as possible to the site. As the 3D printer stands close to the construction site, the engineered files for the Farnsworth House from standard sheets can be sent to the local CNC router, any-where in the world, and someone himself, with a group of friends, or by local labor, can put them together.

Shipping data instead of construction means that questions about ‘intellectual property’, copyrights and licensing arise. The rights to the Farnsworth House are quite limited and therefore used by A Mies for All. Apple has a patent on the Apple Store, where the design is merely described in text. Do we protect design or technology? How do we ensure that the wealth of open design, with a strong involvement of other experts and citizens, is not lost?

A Mies for All is a technology company founded by an artist (Pierre Bismuth), an architect in the Netherlands (One Architecture), an architect and furniture designer in the U.S. (Fil-son Rohrbacher/ AtFab) and a research institution (CAER). This combination might say as much as about the position of the architect as about the status of the building: from a model of the unique to a model in which they are part of the ‘multiple’, plural, possibly made by digital technology.

Ecology of collaborating companies

Using existing designs, it is not necessary that the company designs itself. Liberated from the neurosis to design, A Mies for All can fully focus on the further development of the technology; the innovations in this field and the changing role of the architect are directly readable. A Mies for All is also a polemical research project.

The partners in A Mies for All are part of a global ecology of frequently collaborating companies that explore how digital technology will change architecture. Each of the com-panies focuses on a specific product, with which the puzzle of changing building chain can be slowly resolved.

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Facit Homes, for example, uses the computer to make fairly traditional, customized de-signs cut with a CNC router from the 3D model on the construction site and then as-sembled.

Wiki House provides no design, but develops an open source product; a construction pack-age that allow people to design, download, and then (later) produce their home them-selves. Wiki House has organized itself as a community, where designers from around the world work together in groups that are engaged with software, hardware, and ‘general affairs’ as process, contracts and licensing.

The possibilities of digital technology offering new connections between designers, crea-tors and consumers are the reason that the people behind Wiki House have also estab-lished a distribution platform for digitally distributed Furniture: Open Desk.cc. “Furnitures offer the opportunity to practice on a simple scale”, say Filson Rohrbacher, who sells their product AtFab through the platform. AtFab has a series of furnitures that can be purchased through the website, designed such that they can be made to fit the needs of the user and the material to be used. The information generated by AtFab files can then be used for local production. The result is a family of unique furnitures that are found all over the world. An AtFab chair in Sao Paolo is slightly different in material and dimensions from a relative from Jakarta. For Makerbot, a 3D printing company, AtFab has designed the interior of the headquarters.

Where is this going? Slowly the different architects expand their research to a larger scale, a wider application and a greater role in the construction chain. Supported by a number of major American industrial partners, Filson-Rohrbacher develops a physibles space’, a type of store, together with One Architecture. Here the idea of a Fablab, a room full of tools such as CNC-cutting banks and 3D printers, with which people can make themselves, evolves to a larger scale: furnitures, small buildings, a Farnsworth and possibly even small real estate developments. Private fabrication can evolve into privately development, in which the architect is sometimes a designer, sometimes a software-engineer, sometimes a creator, sometimes a facilitator, and often as a partner. It is intended that the first store will open in United States this year.

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Colophon

After a concept by Pierre Bismuth and Matthijs Bouw

A project by:Pierre BismuthOne ArchitectureFilson-Rohrbacher

Team:Pierre Bismuth, Matthijs Bouw, Nanna Janby, Anne Filson, Gary Rohrbacher, Brendan Cormier

Design & research partnersMediamatic, Elien van Riet, Arnoud Bourdrez, Marcel de Zwaan, onlab.ch, De Waag Soci-ety, Rafe Copeland, THNK, Jelle Feringa

Additional contributions:University of Kentucky, Center for Applied Energy Research, ShopBot, Makerbot, Autodesk, The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

Supported by:The Netherlands Architecture Fund

Text by Matthijs Bouw was published originally in Dutch in De Architect, April, 2014.

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