for all you fans of digital fabrication, mass-customization, and other numerically-controlled 'revolutions' that spawn structural unemployment, you'll be glad to hear that GM is cutting, once again, more jobs and plants from its numerically controlled operations.
nytimes
7 Comments
i liked the creeping paranoia, switters.
But the job losses were because of economic reasons and had nothing to do with new tech.
So Mr. Switters, the article aside, are you saying that if someone likes digital fabrication they should also enjoy sweeping job cuts? Structural umployment started in about 1765 during the first industrial revolution. There's nothing new about it. Maybe we've just become de-sensitized in the last 240 years.
This one stems from the top line as explained in the article. The product is being outperformed in the market on all levels, thus leading to decreased profit margins and to job cuts. What they choose to close in this case, if it is in fact the "numerically controlled operations" units is a shame, as they provide the most beneficial solutions to a weak product.
Nobody said that Architects were saavy business people. After all, we are the proffession that continuously undercuts each others' fees, promises clients to do it faster and cheaper, where interns with $100,000 graduate school debts are willing to work for free and who is happy to pass off responsibilities to "architects of records" and CMGCs.
And though Architecture is not yet at the point of numerically controlled operations, we are at the precipice of entering the new world of REVIT and BIM technology. Soon architecture firms of little to no talent will be able to create construction documents after construction documents of heinous looking extruded brick mall boxes one after another--all with less staff and in less turnaround time.
so mr switters: should we all pack up our laptops and black turtlenecks and head off to the drafting sweatshops in new dehli or shanghai?
do what you like suture. architects are particularly vulnerable to unstudied effects of the technology they use. the euphoric claims that proponents numerical control has made throught hisotry (from well before the first industrial revolution on, eespecially in the darkest moments of the twentieth cnetury) have always had unarticulated risks and effects that are devastating to economies, ecologies, adn people. do you want you like, but before you rush towards the next 'revolution' architects should be more critical about the snake oil salesman (kierian timberlake ini this case) that sell them these rosy dreams. sure BIM and revit will be used. they will no doubt make cheaper and faster motel 6's (because that is what they are deisgned to produce-blind repitition.) It seems that digital fabrication will ultimately and most effectively be employed by those who derive the most benefit from the effects of routinization and management of numbers. At some point you must recoup the cost of set-up and the massively capital intensive infrastructure. In our economy, it makes sense to produce the same thing over and over, that is, it makes sense to emphasis regularity and uniformity rather than customization. Numerical control is not about customization or mass customization but thoroughly about regularity and uniformity-which are far more powerful and profitable techniques than customization. My evidence is simple: the only thing that looks more like a mass-customized, prefabricated house is another mass-customized, prefabricated house. In this sense, nothing is more prefabricated than the reasoning and imagery that prefabricated projects employ. There is a reason for this repetition: efficiency. But why won’t these efficiencies promoted in the digital fabrication literature in turn have the effect of broadly lowering yet again the economic expectations of architectural production. Won’t qualities once again slip away to quantities? Do we really want to argue for less yet again as a profession?
Switters: time for you to write a feature? Ask the NY Times to publish it?
and sure architects are dreamers who wake up to nightmares. Has it always not been the case?
Who doesnt like 30" $90,000 custom milled benches made of endangered amazon trees, with a huge waste factor? How else would people make wood look like it has water ripples going through it? And how else would the Joneses make their suburban cookie cutter home look "cool?"
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