One Thing After Another

One Thing After Another is a project commissioned by Sto Werkstatt to be unveiled at Clerkenwell Design Week exploring the inputs and outputs of information between digital and physical worlds.

The installation starts with an ‘original’ piece of architecture – a garden shed. This is 3D scanned to create a digital copy which is then processed and scaled to fabricate a new CNC’d version from Verolith.

The original shed sits surreally inside this larger digital version, while inside it contains a doll-house scaled copy of itself. It is architecture arranged like a Russian Doll where one version of a thing sits inside another.

Though the technologies of 3D scanning and digital fabrication the original building is both replicated and made different. The original building is ‘transmitted’ into a new state: bigger and materially transformed.

The project uses digital technologies in ways that are less familiar. Instead of seamlessness and efficiency, it is concerned with representation and fidelity, using digital tools as a way of transforming the everyday.

Using a shed as the starting point explicitly cites something both unexceptional, commonplace and ‘primitive’ in architectural terms. These qualities are then processed through contemporary technology so that they become mixed with the exotic possibilities of the digital: Sampled, scaled and multiplied.

Arranged one inside the other, the array of sheds within shed from the outer enlarged version through the original, then to a smaller edition inside. Is this the same building inside and outside of itself? Are they digital reflections forward and backwards?

One Thing After Another argues for a understanding of the possibilities of digital production that go beyond the blandly futuristic. Instead it suggests that new technologies can open up a wide array of design possibilities.