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"Brian Harms is a fifth-year architecture student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. This site is dedicated to the documentation of thesis work completed during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Thesis: Industrial Urbanity and the Robotic Aesthetic

Parametric design software has been a key component in contemporary architectural design. It has allowed designers the freedom to digitally explore a multitude of design alternatives with relatively immediate feedback. This mode of exploration allows for a fluid and dynamic process of experimentation and analysis.

Typically this potential has been employed by designers as a means of optimization. Once a combination is found which maximizes performance and efficiency it is chosen as the final result. In the actualization of this specific set of parameters the fluidity and potential for variation that the software provided is lost, and the seemingly infinite potential of the object is narrowed down to a single state.

I am interested in prolonging the life of the parametric model beyond it's digital existence into the built environment. Hopefully this will imbue a higher, more complex level of interaction between building and participant which is more congruent with the current level of interaction the designer has with his parametric model.

I am investigating the typology of the factory to explore the possibilities of an adaptable, responsive, highly parametric architecture made possible by the population of its space with the latest in robotic technologies (which are already present in many modern manufacturing operations). The primary challenge of this thesis will be to reconsider the role of this production-oriented technology in a way that allows the factory's program, atmosphere, and phyical presence to be constantly renegotiated by the same technology it houses."

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