MEMS, Bio-MEMS, 3-D Imprinting and Affordable Design Automation: Technology’s Audacious Solutions

Architecture and fashion are two sides of the same coin—similar at heart but facing limitations through identity, production, and perception. Designers from every age have struggled with their ideologies. Do they democratize design and potentially sacrifice their artistic identity? Alternatively, do they worship couture and ignore the call to improve the overall public experience? Is it better to reject mass production in fear of banality or do we embrace it?

During this struggle, the tools and methods of design have morphed from hand-drawn details to parametric modeling and calculated, four-dimensional and real-time physics-based design. These powerful tools in our Post-Fordism workplaces have been hailed as a means to enable designers to explore possibilities like never before.

Fashion as Spectacle

Consider fashion as spectacle, and how it is changing. British fashion designer and couturière Alexander McQueen was particularly noteworthy in this arena in that his shows presented a dystopian view of society while celebrating the ability to fabricate the exquisite. Dress No. 13, spring/summer 1999, turned the corner onto the runway as a perfectly executed white dress. Throughout the entire show, models stopped to spin on a rotating platform integrated into the floor, and on either side were two stationary robotic arms. When the model in Dress No. 13 stopped for her rotation, the robotic arms sprang to life; their aggressive movements taunted her and, by the end, the model symbolically became the ill-conceived offspring of technology and fashion.

Iris van Herpen and "New Couture" are reminiscent of a Frank Gehry or a Zaha Hadid or Asymptote, yet the scale and complexity of fashion pieces allow a playfulness with materiality that the building industry does not yet get to enjoy.

Hotel Marqués de Risca designed by Gehry Partners, LLP. An attempt at elegance is burdened by the weight of its own structure and the building underneath. / Photo by Adolfo Rancano/Marriott International

Architects Who Cling

Designers who cling more closely to the crafted narrative, yet obviously employ parametric or data-driven design, are conceptualizers, such as Thomas Heatherwick, Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, and Jeanne Gang, FAIA.

Holding onto the craft keeps us from plastic, repetitive, unitized repetition for the masses. The ultimate goal of parametric design is in line with couture: It allows dreams of things that seem unobtainable and expands our understanding that spaces can and should represent.

Bombay Sapphire Distillery designed by Heatherwick Studio. Glass ribbons and metal boning extrude from the apertures of an adjacent building. The structure is a nod to the 1854 Crystal Palace, and a comparison between the two show how far advancements in material fabrication, production, and design have advanced. / Photo by Iwan Baan

Fashion, Architecture, and Fabrication

With designers constantly looking at how objects, processes, and technologies can be shrunk or enlarged to accommodate new ideas, the masochists of architecture and fashion subject themselves to the pangs of what is possible. Previously expensive and technically complicated methods of production reduce cost, size, and complexity. For the price of a computer, a 3-D printer, a laser cutter, a 5-axis CNC, a waterjet cutter, and a knitter, a lone designer can create, iterate, and fabricate ideas which were previously made by hand, over lifetimes, and by many people.

Tangens necklace and bracelet, part of the LACE by Jenny Wu collection. Fragile 3-D printed pieces interlock and morph to create jewelry whose precision could not be duplicated by hand. / Photo by Christian Coleman

Current avant-garde fabrication is a step towards integrating nascent technologies, but inevitably new methods will allow the tracking and customization of all experience—medical, psychological, and personal. We need something that is so scalable that we can reinvent ourselves. It is the Alice in Wonderland "Eat Me” cakes and "Drink Me” drinks experience at the atomic scale. One day we can create an infinite number of machines in an infinite number of sizes that still serve people well.

A revolutionary technology which could fully integrate architecture and fashion involves microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). These are microscopic mechanical devices made from silicon, metal, or ceramics that could take the semiconductor microchip technology capabilities to a new level of sophistication—and one not bound by any physical size. Industrial and consumer products will be the first to change, but integration of this technology into architecture and fashion will allow for the creation of new materials and ways to interact with one's environment.

Microelectromechanical systems chip.

Consider, for example, micromirror assemblies which are made of millions of actuated reflective surfaces and are responsible for the phasing out of physical film projectors in theaters. When integrated into materials, colors, and reflective surfaces, these could visually emphasize, blind, conceal, or communicate. Bio-MEMS can be integrated into equipment and structures to monitor health and the environment continually. Micro-energy harvesters can be stitched into clothing to power embedded technologies. Integrating MEMS into coatings, fabrics, and objects will change how designers reinforce the specificity of place.

Reinventing the Personal Experience

Iris van Herpen, Thomas Heatherwick, Patrik Schumacher, and so many others are taking the baby steps needed to democratize the uniqueness of experience instead of democratizing experience itself. Be it printing, milling, MEMS, the hand, or the uninvented, the exploration of architectural design and its connections to fashion represent the desire of the design community to reinvent the environments in which people function. Advancements in the scale and pace of material fabrication will lead to revolutions in design and production. With micro-technological monitoring married to environmental and psychological experience control, architecture and fashion may reinvent the concept of individual experience.

Centre Pompidou-Metz designed by Shigeru Ban Architects / Photos by Shigeru Ban Architects Europe et Jean de Gastines / Olivier Dancy

In both the fields of fashion and architecture, one purpose is to create an impact that pushes or imprints an ideal on society. Unfortunately, in the realities of modern practice the drive for “fast” and “mass” impact often sacrifice values. When architecture moves "fast" the resulting fields of boxed homes and strip malls overwhelm and diminish the horizon. When fashion attempts to have a "mass" impact, we become bombarded with strip centers full of H&M-type retailers and mountains of highly disposable garments. The utopian garden of democratized design is seemingly still out of reach, but the hope is that, with improved technologies, designers can finally reach the key to entry.

Throughout the evolution of design philosophies and movements there has been a pattern of embracing craft and custom design, followed by a rejection of decoration in search of a more "pure" and politic design. The current insurgence and expansion of digital fabrication in design is a dynamic crest that allows designers in both architecture and fashion to explore the tension between the social and the fantastical; the future is an empty canvas.
 

Lauren Cadieux and Paul Merrill, AIA are both designers at 5G Studio Collaborative.

 

 

CAPTIONS:

 

Tangens necklace and bracelet, part of the LACE by Jenny Wu collection. Fragile 3-D printed pieces interlock and morph to create jewelry whose precision could not be duplicated by hand. / Photo by Christian Coleman

 

Centre Pompidou-Metz designed by Shigeru Ban Architects / Photos by Shigeru Ban Architects Europe et Jean de Gastines / Olivier Dancy