Week 9 Topic: Practice vs Project III: Nonstandard and Versioning

The five centuries of mechanical culture has allowed for extensive experimentation of effective methods of versioning. This has ultimately improved the production of non-standardised products. Non-standard and versioning greatly relate to the development and management of a product in the production and manufacturing processes. They focus directly on the process involved with refining and maximising product performance through upgrades and / or customisation of technology, not particularly the form itself. Upgrades of “new software [has] opened a generative domain [of] complex morphogenesis and complex geometries” [1], thus, leads to the creation of non-standard designs. This then intends to, “shift the way architects and designers are using technology to expand”[2] while also allowing “architects to think or practice across multiple disciplines, borrowing tactics from film, food finance, fashion, economics and politics for use in design(s)” [3]. It is this concept of the non-standard that could be seen as a method of evoking, “a refusal of normalisation, of widespread standardisation of modernism to deploy standardisation as a fundamental factor of industrialisation, as a determining principle of modernism” [4]. Consequently, it is given that this new method of approaching non-standard designs through versioning is “beyond architecture” [5], as, “this trend has given birth to [a] one-sided world culture of production and products” [6].

______________

r e f e r e n c e s

• [1] [4] [5] [6] Migayrou, Frederic, “The Order of the Non-Standard: Towards a Critical Structuralism” in Theories of the Digital in Architecture, edited by Rivka & Robert Oxman (2014): Pp. 17, 20.
• [2] [3] HoP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli (2002), “Versioning” in The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012, edited by Mario Carpo (2013): Pp. 132.