#c-bip

C-BIP, the Columbia Building Intelligence Project (discontinued at the end of Wigley’s deanship) became the child of GSAPP and OldCastle. Its purpose was to research alternative models of architectural/construction practice and give opportunities to new types of collaboration enabled by software. Much of C-BIP’s archive can be found online. 

The company with whom GSAPP has been collaborating for about a decade.  OldCastle is the one of the biggest provider of architectural materials in NA (North America). They are large but also agile and experimental.  The collaboration between OldCastle and GSAPP started during Mark Wigley's deanship with a conference in four parts, each focused on a specific building material: 1/glass 2/concrete 3/plastic 4/metal. The conference sought to identify a most important issue to focus future collaborative efforts. The adversarial relationship between architecture and construction was outlined as the most pressing issue of our industry. An architectural project always ends up in court cases -- something usually goes wrong and collaborators sue each other. Architecture can learn from the airplane, automobiles and smartphones industries where construction is streamlined and made efficient.

Differences in resources, risk perception, and attitudes about the future environment produce physical variation. Through a shift in use from permanent to temporary, ground location to roof, the block undergoes a transition in zoning, maintaining its density until…