#scott marble

Columbia's Scott Marble named new chair of Georgia Tech's School of Architecture

Craft in architecture is closely tied to detail, which is also being redefined with digital technology. Architectural detail, an architect's means of introducing craft into buildings, is largely a product of the relationship of design to industry. If the modernist's detail was based on negotiating tolerances between pre-manufactured components that were then assembled, today's details are based on the management and organization of information, where tolerances and even assembly procedures can be numerically controlled and parametrically integrated during design. Although these new methods of production do not put architects in the field literally working with their hands, it does reconnect them with making-through information and through a more symbiotic relationship between human intelligence and machine intelligence. Craft does not disappear but rather expands to include not only actual making but design processes. The resistance of material, so much a part of traditional craft, can be part of a knowledge base developed through feedback, both real and simulated, that puts this information in the hands of designers who in turn work with it.