Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The imperfection of earth bricks is often understood as a synonym of low-tech construction in deprived communities. However, it is a simple and, per nature, circular material to build with. The project links state-of-the-art approaches with local traditions by highlighting earth as a contemporary building material. We emphasize the collective experience of building with sustainable materials, using technology to create a shared understanding of building with the community’s hands and to find a post-vernacular narrative for material that is available nearly everywhere: Earth as social sculpture. This project aims to reconnect people with the handmade craft of using earth bricks through digital tools. The bricks made by the students have been stacked on a wall with the help of a HoloLens that works by overlaying a digital 4-dimensional model over the physical world. Despite the mediation of a digital apparatus, the idea is to engage students or later the community in a comprehensive workflow involving handmade production and interactive assembly rather than promoting a mere robotic process The brick structure was developed with parametric design software that generated a real-time procedure directly streamed to the HoloLens. This parametric procedure indicated the worker on a field of mixed reality (integration) where to pick up the brick and place it precisely. In addition, during the assembly process, the height of the bricks had been constantly readjusted to account for the thickness of the mortar. This back-and-forth movement was a crucial point of this collaborative project, as the cycle evolved from the always unique interference of each participant. At the end, the goal of Digital Imperfection is to place humans on the focus of the digital assembly process, to support people’s identification with a “old fashioned” material and re-tell its story in the global south instead of aiming to build with “modern” C02 intensive materials.