The Role of the Architect in the Age of Open Source

In 2012, The Economist released an article about “The Third Industrial Revolution,”1 onemarked by the shift from industrial to digital forms of production.MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld calls it The Revolution on Your Desktop. In the near future,he writes, personal 3D printers will be widely accessible, giving ordinary people the abilityto print the parts they need to fix their broken machines, to produce custom furniture, orto make virtually anything else they can imagine, including the components of the printeritself.2 Nor does there seem to be a limit to the scale of the change. Researchers at the firmGramazio Kohler have experimented with a modular approach to building construction thatemploys robotic arms, and Joris Laarman is honing the art of architectural-scale 3D printing.

Volume Editors
Julie Larsen & Roger Hubeli