Author(s): Neal Lucas Hitch & Erin Hunt
While promising and powerful, the blind adoption of emerging technologies like automation, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence risks repeating historical tenden-cies to prioritize the desires of the core鈥攖hose who manage companies and adopt new technologies鈥攁t the expense of the periphery, which includes laborers, users, and those at risk of displacement by new technologies. Conversely, this paper explores the combination of emerging digital tools with historic construction techniques to innovate solutions that simultaneously preserve meaningful labor while embracing autonomous design ecosystems. The paper specifically investigates the supplementation of historic wattle-and-daub construction with autonomous building technologies, and bio-composite material systems to aid the construction of lightweight deployable structures. By doing so, it traces the collision, conversion, and ultimate trajectory of innova卢tion and preservation in architectural design and practice. Traditional wattle-and-daub is composed of woven stick walls (wattle) plastered with unstabilized earth (daub). In contrast, our process implements digitally fabricated plywood 鈥渨attle鈥 shells and replaces earth daub with alternative materials made from bio-waste aggregates mixed with natural glues. The paper first describes the design and methods behind the process, developed by the authors, which leverage AI, computation, and automation to fabricate deployable wattle shells made of flexible plywood that are then hand-plastered with bio-composite daub mixtures made of organic materials and waste byproducts (e.g., coffee grounds, grape pomace, chopped-straw, and sawdust) using traditional tools and tech卢niques. Next, the paper details the implementation of this technology for the design and construction of two pavilions built for Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, located on the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York. Finally, the paper lists the experiment鈥檚 results after four months of observing the structures for weathering and deterioration.
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-49-4