BUILDING PRODUCTIONS: AN EXHIBITION BY ZACH COHEN NOW OPEN

DATELINE: COLUMBUS, OHIO, MAY 2021 — The Knowlton School 2020-2021 Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor Zach Cohen’s exhibition Building Productions is on view in the Banvard Gallery and online at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University April 19-July 16. The exhibition stages an operational digital fabrication research lab in order to simultaneously reveal and politicize the labor, both human and machine, built-in to automated construction.

From the Exhibition

We have become used to seeing machines autonomously and effortlessly performing extraordinary feats: 3D printers materialize entire homes in under a day, gangly, robotic arms stack gravity-defying brick walls. The promise is also a prophecy. Such commercial visions imply a future in which robots have taken over every job, including that of architects. But that future is far off. (Or perpetually imminent.) In practice, at least, for the moment, automated fabrication technologies still need us—they require human intervention, a sense for the imperfection and unpredictability inherent to architectural materials. Our robots are perfectly tuned to maximum efficiency, in other words, but they are lost at the first sign of a mess.

Reinforcement is an example of a basic structural requirement that 3D printing does not masterfully achieve. Building Productions centers on the staging of an operational lab in the process of developing a method for 3D printing reinforced concrete columns: concrete is automatically deposited into and smushed out of a rebar cage, layer by layer; the ad hoc machinery and the melty prototypes remain in a state of being made. This method is called “piling.” By literally putting the production of piling on stage, Building Productions hopes to simultaneously reveal and politicize the labor, both human and machine, built-in to automated construction: the aim is not only to critique narratives of automated construction, but to offer an alternative vision of the future of architectural labor—one in which architects orchestrate digital fabrication processes that seek to work with, rather than overcome, messy material realities.

See more at https://knowlton.osu.edu/exhibitions/building-productions