Abstract
Many digital fabrication machines have potential dangers, for example, sudden fires or projectile debris; thus, architects are generally required to supervise these machines when they employ them to make things. It is unlikely that further mechanization will ever completely eliminate such dangers since they result from unpredictable material processes. Therefore, as digital fabrication machines proliferate throughout architecture schools and practices, architects will find themselves spending increasingly more time supervising them, and waiting. In this paper, I argue that architects should then not only embrace waiting-with digital fabrication machines as a new form of architectural labor, but also begin to explore the ways in which such waiting can be productive. I begin with a critique of many architects’ impatience with digital fabrication processes. I then use the continental philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “intuition” to discuss the productive potential of waiting-with. Finally, I use a speculative 3D printing workflow to present additional creative possibilities that can arise if architects intentionally build waiting into digital fabrication processes.
Introduction
A panicked New York Times article from 1928 warns that new “labor-saving devices” are triggering mass unemployment: “MARCH OF THE MACHINE MAKES IDLE HANDS,” reads its headline. 1 Nearly 100 years later, emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data analytics have accelerated this march, but the arrival of the robot army that will take every job still appears to be a long way off. What has already arrived is the indefinite transitional phase—in which human laborers learn to labor alongside increasingly automated counterparts. It is therefore critical that we now not only take stock of the ways in which we currently labor, but also speculate on what the future of human labor—and the future human laborer—looks like. As the late philosopher of science Taylor 2 writes in a recent, posthumously published essay entitled, “The Robots are Coming” (and, so, playing to our longstanding fears of their always-imminent arrival): “The most urgent question is what we humans would become in the process of substituting machine labor for human labor.”
If one were to walk through any architecture school’s digital fabrication lab, they might see a half-asleep student perched next to a laser cutter or a computer numerical control router, and quickly devise a seemingly simple answer to Taylor’s urgent question: in replacing machine labor with human labor, we might become machine supervisors (Figure 1). Or, more specifically, we might become human laborers that press “Start” and “Stop,” and, in-between pressing buttons, wait for the machine. The first pages of nearly every digital fabrication machine’s operating manual lists the many latent dangers that require us to supervise these machines as they make our things, for example: sudden fires, flying debris, and splintering tool bits (Figure 2). These dangers are the result of unpredictable material processes: it is therefore unlikely that further mechanization will ever make them fully go away. And so, as more digital fabrication machines continue to seep into architecture schools and practices—and the robot army marches asymptotically closer—we, architects, will find our labor composed of even more waiting.
Students wait dutifully beside laser cutters as these machines perform their “jobs.”
The first page of a laser cutter manual outlines in detail the risks of leaving the machine unattended. 3
In this paper, I argue that we should then not only embrace waiting-with digital fabrication machines as a new form of architectural labor, but also begin to explore the ways in which such waiting can be productive. I will use the continental philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of “intuition” to discuss how waiting-with digital fabrication machines can enable us to cultivate empirical knowledge and self-awareness that can inform the ways in which we design. I will then use a speculative 3D printing workflow to demonstrate the creative possibilities that can arise if we intentionally build waiting into digital fabrication processes.
Architectural work versus architectural labor
I would first like to make a brief note about my decision to use the word “labor” instead of the word “work.” The contemporary architect and theorist Peggy Deamer has recently written and spoken extensively on many architects’ resistance to seeing their design work (e.g. esthetic production, material composition, and systems thinking) as labor. In her book, Architecture and Labor, she argues that architects often prefer to view their designs as “spatial gifts” that they bequeath “to society from some exceptional position outside society itself.” Deamer 4 defines the difference between work and labor accordingly: “work is what we do in our personal lives, as in, we go to work each day; labor is work’s financial institutionalization, a function of the gross domestic product (GDP).”
Automated machines, including digital fabrication machines, are born from capitalist desires to make manufacturing processes faster and more precise, and thus, more economical: according to Deamer’s definition (and to Taylor’s essay) these machines unquestionably labor. Therefore, if we don’t collectively begin to see our design work as labor—that is, as having a role and value in market economies—we won’t be able to find ways to labor with our automated colleagues; further, it will be that much easier for them to prove the entire profession worthless if and when the rest of their market-driven battalion arrives. I am not going to attempt to prove the economic value of architectural design work in this paper. However, my choice of “labor” is meant to imply that it does, in fact, exist.
Waiting for
The labor that defines both contemporary architectural practice and education is marked by constant milestones, reviews, and submissions: there is always a deadline that we are trying not to miss. On days before deadlines, we often storm digital fabrication labs in order to produce final deliverables. If one were to witness this flurry of digital making, they may repeatedly hear some architects ask one another or lab technicians: “How much time will that job take?” Here, the word “job” refers to the labor that the machine will perform, not the architect. This question thus implies that the machine’s job takes the architect’s time. In my opinion, an architect asks such a question in order to gage how much time they’ll spend supervising a machine while it performs its job, or to put it differently, how much time they won’t be able to spend doing something else: something, in their mind, that is actually productive. In other words, they generally approach waiting alongside digital fabrication machines as waiting for them. Such a resentful view of the time they spend with digital fabrication machines leads them to try to either minimize this time or to avoid it entirely.
Many architects try to minimize the time they wait for digital fabrication machines by instructing these machines to make things as fast as possible. For instance, depending on the kind of machine, an architect may increase feeds and speeds, cut depths, stepovers, layer heights, bit sizes, or nozzle diameters in order to add or subtract material at faster rates. However, the limits of machines’ parameters are ultimately dictated by the limits of the materials they are working with. When an architect instructs machines to exceed these limits, they—both them and the machines—enter a precarious territory in which workpieces and/or machine parts can be incinerated. These limits are further kept in check by many architects’ desire for precision: if an architect instructs machines to add or remove chunks, and not bits, of material, their digitally fabricated things will be of a lower, chunkier resolution. Thus, the entanglement of speed, safety, and esthetics constrains the extent to which wait times can be reduced.
It is most common, however, to see architects trying not to wait for digital fabrication machines at all. For example, in 3D printing, many architects will merely upload their files to a 3D printer, press “Start,” and walk away (seemingly to go and do a more productive task). Alternatively, in the case of more dangerous machines that require their oversight (e.g. laser cutters, water jets, or CNC routers), an architect might assume their post besides these machines, thus satisfying the machines’ safety requirements, but frequently choose to interact with other machines (e.g. phones or laptops) at the same time (Figure 1). In both scenarios, we see architects strive to replace the labor of waiting with the pseudo-labor of multitasking. In not being physically present or being physically but not mentally present, these architects fundamentally distance themselves from the digital fabrication process, and all the machine labor that goes into it; they thus lose an opportunity to both understand how digital fabrication machines translate digital objects into material things and speculate on how such translations can be made differently. If instead these architects recast their need to wait for digital fabrication machines as the possibility of waiting-with digital fabrication machines—if they learn to see waiting-with as a form of architectural labor—they can renew opportunities to both glean instrumental knowledge and embody architectural making. Such opportunities may, in turn, lead them to discover new, collaborative modes of both digital fabrication and architectural design.
I hyphenate “waiting-with” in order to insist that it is an activity distinct from simply “waiting,” which, as I argue, tends to be viewed as a moment of inactivity, or even a hindrance, that needs to be overcome.
Why Bergson, why now
Why use Henri Bergson—a continental philosopher at the turn of the 20th century—to explicate the idea of waiting-with contemporary technologies? More specifically, why use Bergson instead of posthumanist philosophers that are currently rethinking the ways in which humans interact with nonhuman things, including tools and machines?
Broadly speaking, posthumanist ontologies aim to flatten nonhuman and human entities into one existential plane by equalizing their respective agencies. Bergson similarly recognizes “the life force” (élan vital) of all things, human and non-human alike. However, unlike the various equalizing forces posited by posthumanist ontologies—for example, the mysterious “allure” in Harman’s 5 “object-oriented ontology” or filamentous, branching structures in Latour’s 6 “actor-network theory”—the equalizing force in Bergson’s ontology is our shared existence in time. Bergson 7 contends that while we, humans and nonhumans, exist in time together, we each experience it differently: this individual experience is what he calls “duration” (durée). Bergson 8 explains that disparate things, for example, humans and machines, can “reciprocally interpenetrate” or feel each other’s durations but can never fully exchange them. Still, he urges us to attempt to enter the durations of other beings; this effort is not only how we collectively work toward more “profound forms of sociality,” but also how we both realize and expand our own intuitions and self-knowledge. 9 I will expand on this idea in the next section. Contemporary architects should look at their work through Bergson’s ontology because, as I began to illustrate earlier, their relationships to both machines and time are, in most cases, fundamentally broken. Architects’ general impatience with material and fabrication processes has recently reached new extremes: numerous technological start-ups now advertise entire homes that can be 3D printed in 24 h, bricklaying robots that work five times as fast as their human forebearers, and crews of autonomous excavators that can accelerate construction by working around the clock.10–12 The market-oriented narratives that these companies sell are far from the arduously slow (and inevitably messy) realities of most construction projects. And yet, many architects continually buy into, and sometimes even commercialize, these myths: they’ll do anything to produce things more quickly.
Bergson also lived and worked in a historical moment in which industry was taking over the public perception of temporality. In 1880, 9 years prior to the publication of Bergson’s seminal dissertation, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, the British government instituted “Greenwich Mean Time” (GMT): a standard time for all of Great Britain. This decree came only after British railway companies lobbied for decades for a standardized time that would enable them to synchronize national train schedules. 13 Two years after Time and Free Will was published, French railway companies, largely in reaction to GMT, successfully lobbied for “Paris Mean Time,” which similarly aimed to prevent passengers from missing their trains. 14 All of a sudden, across Europe, each person’s perception of time had to conform to the time that public clocks told, in other words, to the time that industry wanted them to see. In contrast—and I would argue, in response—to this mechanization of time, Bergson urged his contemporaries to feel their own, individual times. Today, many architects are in need of a similar reexamination and, ultimately, a repair: they don’t need to take their time back from automated machines, speed these machines up, or create the appearance that they’re being sped up—they need to attempt to into these machines’ durations.
Waiting-with: The basics
In his 1903 essay, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson 15 defines intuition as “the sympathy (sympathie) by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.” For Bergson, what is “unique and consequently inexpressible” in an object is how it exists in time, that is, its duration. In Matter and Memory, he writes “. . .our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements and nothing else”; in other words, how each of us feels and moves through each passing moment defines our individual existences. 16 We can therefore rephrase Bergson’s definition of intuition as: the ability to understand the existence of an object by feeling its duration. I argue that it is then possible to cultivate an intuition of how digital fabrication machines exist—for example, live, work, and labor—by attempting to feel their durations. Further, I want to demonstrate that we can feel the durations of digital fabrication machines by waiting-with them. In endeavoring to transport ourselves into the durations of digital fabrication machines, we can also better understand the selves we are transporting, both as architects and material bodies. We can then use this nascent instrumental and self-knowledge to build new ways to labor with these machines.
Let’s take a concrete example: an architect decides to wait-with a desktop 3D printer as it reproduces their digital model into material form. What intuition and self-knowledge might this architect gain from this labor?
As I mentioned earlier, most architects’ typical interactions with 3D printers consist of uploading a file, pressing “Start,” and then walking away. They then return several hours, if not days, later to find their 3D print has been finished and the 3D printer itself is more or less exactly as they left it: motionless, indifferent, and intact. Therefore, they tend to see the 3D printer in terms of things that are complete rather than things being made or in terms of products rather than things-in-process.
In waiting-with the 3D printer, the architect perceives each and every moment of 3D printing: the stationary start, the roving middle, and the stationary end. What we normally call “3D printing” generally only refers to the middle part. However, 3D printing requires beginnings and ends, and these beginnings and ends are equally formative to the fabrication process. And so, in waiting-with the 3D printer, the architect may not only begin to see the machine as an embodiment of a temporal process—as opposed to a lifeless object—but also begin to more fully understand the process that it embodies.
The architect may recognize, for instance, that the middle part of 3D printing—the “productive” part—is not nearly as smooth or continuous as 3D prints may lead us to believe; in actuality, there are several delays (Figure 3). There are short delays that exist in-between every printed layer and then even shorter, almost imperceptible delays that exist when the machine must deposit material around a sharp corner. 3D printing, like any other digital process, depends as much on programed delays as it does on continuity. However, the delays programed into the 3D printer are specific to 3D printing, or, as Bergson might say, its temporality is “unique.” Without these delays, both the machine and the thing it is making would collapse into a pile of material that can no longer endure.
A diagram of a standard 3D printing workflow: a digital model is sliced into layers, which are then converted to g-code; the machine then prints each layer, one by one, starting at the bottom.
Not long into the middle part of the 3D printing process, the architect starts to observe glitches and decides to press “Pause.” Glitches are often the result of material processes gone awry, for example, clogged nozzles or warped print beds (Figure 4). Most architects in both practice and education delegate the troubleshooting of such problems to in-house technicians, that is, professional machine supervisors. In removing themselves from the machine’s maintenance, these architects not only lose instrumental knowledge, but also double down on the notion that the labor of architectural design is only what comes out of the machine, that is, the fabricated thing, and not the orchestration of the digital fabrication process itself. (The robotic footsteps grow louder.) This prevalent, impatient relationship with the 3D printer thus reinforces the longstanding divide between architects and builders: here, the builder can either be read as the technician or the machine.
The 3D printer here labored through early warping to continue making the rest of this massive, lengthy print.
In waiting-with the 3D printer, and caring for its labor, the architect might learn not only how to manage material glitches, but also how to instrumentalize them into design features. Such experimentation with digitally-fabricated glitches has historically been a fertile source of design innovation.17,18 Attention to material glitches might also remind the architect that the outcomes of architectural projects across various scales are, as I mentioned earlier, often dictated by material constraints. Finally, such caring-for the tools of production might lead the architect toward a renewed appreciation of the builders they work with, both human and nonhuman alike.
At around the 20th hour of the print job, the 3D printer is working seven inches above its build plate, and it’s starting to tremble (Figure 4). The architect, too, is fatigued, after a whole night of waiting-with. The 3D printer and the architect are now “reciprocating” exhaustion. In this act of sympathy, the architect may begin to see the 3D printer as less of a machine and more of a mechanical body (one that leaks and excretes, no less). The architect might then become more aware of the very body that they are waiting in: the body that was transported through sympathy. Such embodied self-awareness contrasts with the feedback most architects receive from their typically limited interactions with digital design and fabrication technologies, which generally reduce their bodies to no more than two eyes and ten fingers. But we, architects, need to be aware of more than two eyes and ten fingers if we are going to design spaces that people can physically (and pleasantly) inhabit. In waiting-with the 3D printer, the architect can more fully realize their own embodiment and perhaps, in turn, can begin to renew the physicality of architectural labor.
Twenty-three hours from its motionless start, the 3D printer is motionless once again: the 3D print is finally complete. The architect pries their 3D printed thing from the machine’s build plate and returns blearily to their desk. In their post-digital haze, the architect begins to dream of ways in which they can use their newfound empirical and architectural knowledge toward more collaborative 3D printing workflows; 3D printing workflows, in other words, with more waiting-with.
Improvisational 3D printing: A case study in advanced waiting-with
“Improvisational 3D printing” or “imprinting” is a speculative desktop 3D printing workflow I designed that is founded on waiting-with the 3D printer. In imprinting, there is no digital model for the 3D printer to materially reproduce and, thus, no autonomous printing process for an architect to walk away from. Instead, imprinting requires an architect to be in the 3D printer’s duration. Further, imprinting enables architects to more fully embody the 3D printer’s duration by building the machine’s brief delays—that is, those inherent to its layered deposition process—into protracted moments that can be occupied.
In the imprinting workflow, an architect first draws a “base contour” (or contours) on a sheet of tracing paper that is on top of a graphics tablet. The architect then traces over their contour with the tablet’s stylus. The tablet inputs each trace to custom software, which formats it into a g-code file, and then sends that file to the 3D printer through serial communication. When the architect lifts their hand from the paper/tablet, there is a short pause as the software silently confirms that the trace is complete, and there are no more contours to be traced. The 3D printer then reproduces the architect’s hand-drawn trace in plastic. After the 3D printer has reproduced the architect’s trace, it moves vertically by a predetermined amount to await the next hand-drawn input. The architect, in turn, must wait for the 3D printer to reproduce their trace before tracing over their contour once more: the software only allows one g-code file to be sent at a time (Figures 5 and 6). The architect can continue tracing over the same initial contour or overlay a new sheet of tracing paper in order to draw a new contour to trace over. This workflow enables the architect to improvise the form of a 3D print layer by layer or trace by trace.
Imprinting workflow diagram.
The imprinting workflow: tracing paper to graphics tablet to software to 3D printer.
Diagram of haptic extrusion control.
The time required to improvise a 3D print is ultimately determined by the amount of time the architect waits-with between traces: there is only a minimum time that is established by the duration of the machine. For example, a 3” cubic volume takes a minimum of 1 h to imprint (Figure 11).
There are two functions built into the imprinting workflow that further differentiate it from conventional, continuously automated 3D printing. As I previously explained, when an architect finishes a trace, that trace is then, after a brief pause, sent to the machine. However, it is also sent to the software’s “trace bank,” which is presented to the architect in the software’s interface. If the architect is tired and no longer wishes to physically produce traces, they can select a trace from the trace bank and press the “retrace” button, which will send that trace to the 3D printer. In this way, imprinting leverages the machine’s ability to endlessly repeat the same task, or a previous task, with precision. As I mentioned earlier, such repetition is at the core of how the machine exists through time. The insertion of the machine’s more fluid temporality into the architect’s more delayed duration introduces the possibility of relatively smoother moments in an otherwise rough sketch.
The second function unique to imprinting is one that makes the amount of extrusion relative to the pressure that the architect exerts on the tablet: like a typical ballpoint pen, more pressure results in more material bleed (Figure 7). If the architect begins to tire, they will invariably apply less pressure with the stylus. The result of this muscle fatigue will be moments in the object that have less plastic and, thus, are both thinner and softer; in other words, when the architect loses the ability to endure, they also lose the ability to create more durable things.
The imprinting application interface contains the trace bank and the retrace button, as well as basic information such as the number of traces, the stylus’ X–Y coordinates on the tablet, the pressure of the stylus (as a percentage), a message that tells the architect if they are making contact with the tablet (it tends to interpret being close as making contact), and a drawing area in which each trace is visualized as it is being traced. Once the architect completes a trace, that trace immediately disappears from the drawing area and reappears as a file—that is, a digital memory—in the trace bank (Figure 6).
The creative possibilities of building sympathy
Imprinting begins to reveal some of the creative possibilities that can arise if architects build opportunities for sympathy—or, moments to wait-with—into digital fabrication processes. In this section, I will employ the thinking of the contemporary architect and theorist Lars Spuybroek to discuss these possibilities. I will specifically use Spuybroek’s treatise on digital esthetics, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (SOT), which draws heavily on Bergson’s philosophy.
The “organizing act” of the architect-3D printer machine
In SOT, Spuybroek 19 writes “. . .if the mind wants to be in the process of making, it must be not only open but forward-looking, in the direction of as-yet-unknown creation” In imprinting, the alternation between waiting and printing—the architect prints while the machine waits, then the machine prints while the architect waits—produces a collaborative fabrication process in which the architect and the machine slowly and improvisationally make a thing over time: waiting-with becomes creating-with; the labor of both digital fabrication and design becomes shared. The architect creates-with the machine by not only paying attention to its perfect reproduction of their inevitably imperfect traces, but also by looking forward to, or anticipating, the trajectory of “as-yet-unknown creation” (Figure 8). The architect’s thinking labor thus complements the machine’s mechanical labor.
A publice performance of imprinting at the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture: the architect looks towards the “as-yet-unknown creation.”
For example, in imprinting, an architect can ask themselves: is the form beginning to lean in one direction? Is material starting to accumulate in one section? Is there too much or too little difference between traces? The architect can respond to such questions by introducing a new base contour that they can use to guide the emergent object (Figure 9). In this way, imprinting begins to resemble Spuybroek’s own reading of Bergson’s “intuition”: “. . .dancing always starts with the mere mirroring or complementing of the other’s moves; one subsequently starts to vary the moves, expand on them, make countermoves, insert extra steps, that is, act within the act of sympathy. This is exactly what the method of intuition is: an extension of sympathy through a floating and modulating of attention, a specific effort of gradation.” 15 Imprinting demonstrates that waiting-with can transform both digital fabrication and design into a kind of dance: one in which the machine and the architect make, think, and move through time together (Figure 10). 20
An improvised 3D print or “imprint,” demonstrates the potential of 3D printing to become a kind of sketch modeling.
The imprinting “dance.”
Bergson’s distinction between a “manufactured machine” and an “organized machine” helps to further elucidate the creative benefits of the “imprinting dance.” Bergson writes: “the manufacturer finds in his product exactly what he has put into it. If he is going to make a machine, he cuts out its pieces one by one and then puts them together: the machine, when made, will show both the pieces and their assemblage. The whole of the result represents the whole of the work; and to each part of the work corresponds a part of the result.” In “an organized machine,” on the other hand, “the parts of the machine do not correspond to the parts of the work, because the materiality of this machine does not represent a sum of means employed, but a sum of obstacles avoided.” 8
In conventional 3D printing, the 3D printer performs as a manufactured machine, that is, a machine that has been precisely configured to reproduce predetermined, ideal ends. In the imprinting dance, on the other hand, the architect and the machine are tenuously configured, through duration, into an organized machine that 3D prints. In this new “architect-3D printer machine,” the component mechanical parts become muddied: it is not clear which part performs what work to what ends; the work of both entities becomes distributed across the assemblage. Such fluidity stems from the fact that the architect and the machine are organized around the act of 3D printing rather than the production of a 3D print; there is, as I previously mentioned, no predetermined form to work toward. Instead, the architect-3D printer machine co-improvises a thing neither could have made on their own.
Fabricism: An esthetics of Being-in-the-Making
In SOT, Spuybroek 19 writes: “Both the objective model (from form to order to the mind) and the subjective model (from feeling to the sense to form) of esthetics are fundamentally flawed: our feelings resonate with processes, processes that allow things to oscillate between being-in-the-making and the being-made.” Here, Spuybroek is plainly echoing Bergson, 15 who tells us “. . .there do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in a process of change.” Spuybroek, like Bergson, urges us to privilege neither the subjective nor the objective model but to recognize that “all things feel and all things engage in esthetic relations by sharing those feelings and coordinating them”; in other words, all things are engaged in an ongoing process of sympathy. 19 Spuybroek argues that architects can and should work toward a new esthetic by feeling our way into this process, an esthetic he calls “fabricism.”
Improvised 3D prints, or “imprints,” demonstrate fabricism. The esthetics of imprints are not determined by some objective form of beauty, for example, a classical order or a parametrically-generated form, or by the sculptural whims of an architect. Instead, imprints’ esthetics are solely a record of the performance of the architect-3D printer machine: a performance that centers on the “organizing act” of 3D printing. 8 Imprints thus constantly oscillate between states: between digital and material, human and machine, making and made. This in-betweenness—or, what I could call blurriness—is what characterizes imprints’ esthetics: the hand of the machine and the hand of the architect continually bleed into one another, reciprocally emerging and receding, printing and waiting, always acting together within the act of sympathy (Figure 11). Such blurriness encourages closer inspection: observers might eventually get so close to the imprint that they find themselves simultaneously sympathizing with its duration and realizing their own (Figure 12).
The oscillation between human and machine repetitition creates a blurry aesthetic in which the durations of both swirl around in the digitally fabricated thing.
Imprints take on a life and duration of their own and, thus, can also participate in the process of sympathy.
Spuybroek 19 cautions us that without fabricism, “making will fall back into the hands of engineers, who persistently confuse making with the assembly of predetermined parts according to predetermined relations, such as that between a bolt and a nut or a post and a beam,” that is, the hands of those that only see the possibility of “manufactured machines.” 19 Spuybroek’s caution resonates with my earlier warnings about the industrial takeover of time. The current landscape of commercialized digital fabrication leads me to believe that making may already be a decidedly technocapitalist enterprise. For Spuybroek and I, sympathy is thus not simply an opportunistic mode of making, but a critically defensive measure. If we, architects, build sympathy into our digital fabrication methodologies, and reintroduce esthetics as a fundamental concern of technology, we can begin to resist the teleological tendencies of contemporary, market-driven architectural practices.
Conclusion
The robots will always be coming. Meanwhile, automation is changing architectural labor at a rate and scale that we still hardly understand. It is time for architects to take a moment to pause—we need to not only see the digital fabrication machines that now exist in our studios, labs, and offices but also begin to understand the ways in which they come into being. We are already there, dutifully waiting besides these machines: we only need to open our bleary eyes, pay attention, and begin to wait-with them. If we begin to see waiting-with digital fabrication machines as a new form of architectural labor—if we recognize that these machines, like us, come into being through time—we can unlock instrumental and material knowledge that we can feedback into our design and fabrication processes. We might even begin to envision ways in which waiting-with can become creating-with, and begin to create things that we could have never envisioned on our own. And so, I urge architects: while we wait for the robots to arrive, we should practice the kind of waiting we’d like to do if and when they ever get here.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Christos Yessios Professorship Fund at The Ohio State University.
