Reconnecting...

This design research reimagines the architectural detail in a postdigital framework and proposes digital methods to work upon discrete tectonics. Drawing upon Marco Frascari's writing The Tell-the-Tale Detail, the study aims to reimagine tectonic thinking for focused attention after the digital turn. Today, computational tools are powerful enough to perform operations more similar to physical tools than in the earlier digital era. These tools create a "digital materiality," where architects can manipulate digital information in parallel and overlapping ways to physical corollaries. (Abrons and Fure, 2018) To date, work in this area has focused on materiality specifically. This project reinterprets tectonics using texture map editing and point cloud information, particularly reconceptualizing jointing using images. Smartphone-based 3D digital scanning was used to captured details from a series of Carlo Scarpa's influential works, isolating these details from their physical sites and focusing attention upon individual tectonic moments. As digital scans, these details problematize the rhetoric of smoothness and seamlessness prevalent in digital architecture as they are discretely construed loci yet composed of digital meshes. (Jones 2014) Once removed from their contexts, reconnecting the digital scans into compositions of "compound details" necessitated a series of new mechanisms for constructing and construing not native to the material world. Using Photoshop editing of texture-mapped images, digital texturing of meshes, and interpretation of the initial material constructions, new joints within and between these the digital scanned details were created to reframe the original detail for the post-digital.