New materiality: ideation, representation and digital fabrication

Digital fabrication has become the true counterpoint to computer aided design in architecture. Thanks to new C.A.D. technologies architectural design can now manufacture complex buildings that only a decade ago could have been almost impossible to develop. This convergence between C.A.D./C.A.M. technologies is producing a trend from construction to manufacture. Arbitrariness of architectural form should not be confused with arbitrariness of architectural design, the latter being contradictory with the very essence of design. Conventional or digital architecture must achieve design consistency and must rely on architecture’s basic principle, that of necessity. New materiality is a term being coined in relation to digital fabrication and the way it should address materiality in architecture. Innovation on the use of conventional materials, the ways in which they may be manufactured or tiled, as well as the emergence of new materials may outline what new materiality is about.