Mollie Claypool – Discrete automation
“I find it incredibly odd that our world has changed but our vision of the built environment hasn’t”
Mollie Claypool dives into her work as an architecture theorist concerned with “discrete automation”. This is a way of bringing the so-called digital architecture of our current practices together with automation of processes familiar from other industries. With a post-work future in mind, we need to reimagine the way we construct buildings. The elements that make up a building have, in fact, not changed essentially since the industrial revolution. While the tools architects use have developed to handle more and more complex designs, the actual process of building large-scale structures still requires thousands of individual parts and a myriad of contractors and subcontractors. Automation could help in reducing the resources required, as well as giving the end user a more direct role in shaping the built environment. It could help drive systemic change and result in more flexible, agile and resilient buildings with smaller carbon footprints.
