“CNC a Mountain”:
A Proposal for Contemporary Rock-Cut
Architecture
In relation to time, the momentum of
contemporary architecture is toward compressing it: Faster
production, of increasingly temporary constructions, responding to ever more
fleeting conditions within an urban kaleidoscope. The assumed goal
of architectural production is to keep up with a perceived acceleration of
cultural transformation -- respond to, accommodate, and facilitate the
quickening cycles of dissipation and emergence of the culture around it.
Implicitly or explicitly, this is the contemporary modus operandi – with
responses ranging from design that favors timely decoration, or kinetic facades,
programmable LED’s, digital projection and large screens, to simply grounding
the design process in planned obsolescence. The consequence of
this direction is not simply a practical matter of shorter building life cycles
– it inverts what historically has been a constant core virtue of what
architectural production offers: longevity – of all that humans make,
architecture set in place the farthest extension into the future.
The current
proposal is oriented in the opposite direction: toward extreme longevity, and
the questions about our relationship to the future that it entails.
The medium for doing so is through a current day re-visiting of a long
dormant form of architecture: rock-cut architecture.
...
Few
offerings from the history of architecture could be more self-evidently
irrelevant to contemporary architectural practice than rock-cut
architecture. This irrelevance is not simply the result of
production logistics that make it impractical – it is that the modern lifeworld
as currently configured simply has nothing to be expressed through this form of
architecture: a raw material left in situ tediously sculpted into something that
will last almost forever. Rock-cut
architecture is fundamentally antithetical to the pathological shortsightedness
of the day. This is precisely what makes it so essentially relevant. Its fundamental otherness within our myopic period of
history is its virtue.
...
Speaking
purely in logistical terms, rock-cut architecture presents unique test cases for
a variety of state-of-the-art technologies. The process, as
outlined in the HOW: Production Concept, is one-to-one scale subtractive digital
fabrication, in which the raw material used is an in-situ stone mass. The concept in summary:
a small army of mobile CNC robots with stonecutting capability,
coordinated through a high-accuracy local positioning system, collectively
carving an in situ stone mass according to a highly articulated parametric
digital model.
Aside from
the R&D required with the technologies just described, there is a more
fundamental epistemological puzzle: how much can we know about an
in situ rock mass through non-destructive means? This is a key
piece of the research that extends to the limits of current geological
engineering, only explored at a cursory level so far, as described in the
IF/WHEN: Structural Analysis section.
There will
inevitably be limits to the accuracy possible for the data gathered about the
stone mass, consequently the model will need to be parametrically robust to
adapt to the changing conditions as information increases about the stone mass
through controlled subtraction.
As a friend
of mine put it: CNC a
mountain.