Special issue: SIGraDi critical appropriations

This special issue of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) includes original manuscripts and extended versions on the proposed topics of the XXVI Congress of the Iberoamerican Society of Digital Graphics, SIGraDi 2022 Critical Appropriations ¹ and of the Homo Faber 3.0 exhibition, Appropriations of Digital Fabrication from Latin America. ² These online events were organized in November 2022 by the School of Architecture of the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Peru.

The call Critical Appropriations challenges our assumptions, considering the actions, processes, and consequences of transformative design and its possibilities. The call explores how global digital design culture can be reinterpreted locally and its impact across scales and territories. Appropriations refer to a critical design practice of objects, architecture, and urbanism, including their processes, techniques, and technologies. Appropriations that consume local materials and review craft strategies through case studies that transcend the conventional boundaries of local practices influenced by global perspectives. Appropriations challenge the notion of the digital as a neutral universal medium and highlight the fundamentally creative nature of adoption of technology. Southern and Northern hemispheres' appropriations differ, as they are influenced by specific experiences, types of learning, cultural awareness, economics, and social patterns of each region.

This special edition of eight articles is enriched by the diversity of authors and their research perspectives. The eight contributions, from Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Chile, the United Kingdom, China, Jordan, and the United States, are organized by scale of action, from object to urban design.

The first four manuscripts analyze Critical Appropriations in the context of objects or components. The articles include collaboration and craft appropriations, robotic printing with locally sourced earth-based materials, glocal perspectives and nature-based growing morphologies, and form-finding and creativity.

In the article “Encapsulating Creative Collaborations: A Case Study in the Design of Cement Tiles,” authors Vinicius Mizobuti, Gabriela Lamanna Soare, Antonio Carlos Laraia Figueira de Mello, Diogo Matsui, and Thais de Matos Ilkiw explore the nexus of traditional and computational craftsmanship in the production of cement tiles. Setting aside for a moment the very compelling results, a particular interest to this issue is their focus on collaborations with industry. The authors are able to show how computational instruments enrich and mediate encounters between architects, tile makers, and tile setters, offering an enriched picture of the social fabrics of computational designing and making. Richly documenting their process and products, while firmly rooting them on state-of-the art research, this article extends a growing body of design practice and research, challenging old distinctions between craft and technology, and artistic work and serialized production.

In “Biodigital Stool Series: Nature-based Growing Morphologies Through Additive Manufacturing and Generative Design,” the authors David Torreblanca, Juan Velásquez Peña, and Pablo Banda put in perspective hybrid cultural construction and glocality—local identity and external influences—by including living organisms, growth patterns from nature, and a transdisciplinary approach into this research. The bio-digital design research reflects on computational design, nature, design, and additive manufacturing, comparing the differential growth, branching, and Voronoi patterns and fabrication with Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology.

Authors Gamze Gündüz and Mine Özkar propose a framework for robotic clay printing using locally sourced earth-based materials and explore the production of component-based wall systems. In their article “A Process-Based Framework for Adaptable Modules in Robotic Clay 3D Printing,” they investigate the use of sustainable alternative materials for vernacular construction, combining them with current fabrication techniques. The authors evaluate a variety of 3D-printing configurations and clay mixtures. The goal is to optimize the parameters of these materials to create a self-interlocking modular system, while transferring knowledge.

In “A Creative Form-finding Tool: Deformation of Plastic Sheets Due to the Influence of Temperature and Gravity,” authors Ever Patiño, Jorge Maya, and Andrés Obregón reinterpret the forming process of thermoplastics deformation, its constraints, and technical properties. This process is a starting point of an analog, semi-structured verification approach that uses data from the physical deformation process to codify the computational algorithm. This process does not use molds but manipulates different parameters that impact the mechanical properties of the plastic sheets, enriching the form-finding process and, in turn, producing a more precise algorithm.

The following three manuscripts explore Critical Appropriations at the architecture scale in relation to fabrication-based design, multilingual shape Grammars, and housing ownership platform topics.

The article “Crafting Innovation: Discrete Timber Pavilions and Fabrication-Driven Approaches” by Katherine Cáceres Corvalán and Francisco Calvo Castillo describes a process that combines material-oriented design, fabrication-driven design, and computational design methods. The authors critically appropriated local technical, spatial, and cultural knowledge of a Chilean wood type to explore stereometry as a discrete design system, with side-by-side joints as part of the traditional manufacturing process with digital technologies, enhancing and expanding the traditional analog processes.

In “The International Style’ multilingual three-dimensional grammar and hybrid designs,” author Debora Benros presents an approach to understanding the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le Corbusier using an innovative three-dimensional multilingual Shape Grammar’s method, resulting in hybrid designs created from the mix of two or more parent design languages. This exploration involves the appropriation, as well as design-after-design possibilities, of a system that can be used to produce expert evaluations of classic or new designs by the original architects.

In their article titled “OTDF Platform: A New Paradigm of Homeownership for Life with Mobility and Liquidity,” Wanzhu Jiang and Jiaqi Wang introduce a platform that aims to tackle the challenges of housing in the post-digital era. The platform is designed to convert residential communities into adaptive and reconfigurable systems, allowing their coexistence in an anticipated scenario. The authors evaluate traditional housing models and propose innovative concepts to address post-digital era challenges.

Finally, Critical Appropriations on the urban scale is evident in “Shape Grammars and Self-Built Refugee Communities: The Transformation from Tent Shelter to Customized Structure in Irbid Camp.” In this article, authors Dima Abu-Aridah and Heather Ligler employ Shape Grammars to study a refugee camp established in the 1950s to house Palestinian refugees in Jordan after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Combining visual computational methods with a rich empirical base, which includes original photographs and interviews with camp inhabitants, this research helps reveal patterns of change and opportunities for spatial improvement. Of particular relevance to this issue, the article “critically appropriates” Shape Grammars—a method most often used to visually examine canonical or celebrated buildings—to draw our attention to the architectures of long overlooked subjects and ways of living.

In this special SIGraDi issue, creative, Critical Appropriations were critically analyzed through multilingual grammar, bio-digital design, architectural computing, fabrication-based design, agent-based systems, and shape grammars, with reflexive approaches on local conditions, new tools, housing ownership, and collaborations. These eight manuscripts thoroughly synthesize the concept of Critical Appropriations aspiring to transcend architectural computing to respond to the complexity and challenges of our society, encouraging significant transformations of knowledge and creation, linking experimental environments and new habitats.