• Callicott, Nick. “Adaptive Architectural Design.” Design Through Making 75.4 (2005): 66-69. AD Reader. Web. 25 Sept. 2013. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.105/abstract>
• Callicott positions his practice amongst the considerable expertise and knowledge of advanced fabrication techniques with illustrations of recent prototypes made for a future dwelling.

CAM’s “physical capability – to realise unique and complex environments – has finally begun to displace the iconic after image of 20th-century mass production.”(66)

Callicott proposed that “complexity and variety in architecture can be explored beyond the prior bounds of standardisation, yet within an economic framework increasingly favourable to the unique.”(66)

“our role as architects is being transformed by subscription to these techniques. However, we must remember that our roles may equally be transformed by a lack of participation”(66)

“the outcome depends on how architects define a methodology for the use of contemporary production with respect to the practice of design. So, we are going to have to reconsider what it is that architects do.”(66)

“there is a dimension to our knowledge and activity as designers that is, by definition, unspeakable. These are abilities that cannot be easily translated to another individual except through a prolonged process of practice and learning.”(66)
“I am convinced that a consideration of this tacit dimension is a necessary step in the re-creation of our identity as architects.”(67)

Since architecture has been definable as a profession, the conventional drawing has comprised one of the essential protocols that separate the maker
from the architect, a device of status and demarcation”

Capturing the Tacit

• Record/Playback system developed by GE in 1947 (67)
• sought to capture and translate the tacit component of making into a numerical transcription.
• recorded actions of a machinist operating a modified machine tool
• the uniqueness of the event is enlisted to realise the repetition of standardisation.
• It was an attempt, to capture the skill of the individual and translate it into a repeatable, permanent and geometric event.
• system’s key weakness as a continued reliance on a skilled workforce, since a skilled craftsman was required for the initial input for each part
• this reliance also embedded a further technical weakness in that the complexity and geometry of the objects was fundamentally limited by human dexterity.
• Computer Numerical Control (67-68)
• resulted from research in the aircraft industry and later at MIT
• conceived as a system by which complete separation from the tacit dimension of making could be achieved
• each of the operations of a manufacturing process could be described through an original scripting, rather than through a replication of a moment past.
• one of the most significant changes in production radically redefining the professional demarcations by which the physical world is brought into being
• began a transformation of mass production into mass customization

“the technological development of architectural production over this period initially fails to reflect these changes”(68)
Instead, architecture adopted “industrialised building products and systems”(67)

In architecture, drawing separates the architect from the maker, “a device of status and demarcation.”(67)
Record/playback “creates a representational mode that suggests a direct equivalence between description and object never before attained within conventional graphical modes of description.”(67)
Before, you had to draw to tell someone what to do, record/playback changes that paradigm as one that can be directly applied.

“architectural practice has more typically used CAD to increase the efficiency with which traditional two-dimensional visualisations are created.”(68)
This mirrors what Menges says about the initial adoption of CAD systems.

Modern CAM software enables “authoring and simulation of the actually machining process specific to a virtually modelled form”. This makes visual and graphic representation the “primary medium of communication”.(68)

“When we use CAM software to create a time-based simulation that reveals the sequence of subtraction or addition by which form is realised, we are in a sense neither making nor drawing, but are engaged only in an active reading of an authored function that differentiates surplus matter from our unique form. Making, therefore, has become dependent on the author, object (architecture) and observer existing within a cybernetic condition, within which a continuous and changing dialogue between form and observer is maintained.”(68)

“It has been argued that architects make drawings not buildings, that the relationship to the drawing and the image defines not only their professional status, but their identity.”(69)
The author suggests that this tradition can be turned on its head

Definitions:

Adaptive Manufacture: the very manipulation of material becomes a means by which response is generated, modified and, ultimately, understood.