Towards a New Kind of Building: A Designers Guide for Non-Standard Architecture

Today's buildings are designed with digital tools and produced by digitally controlled methods. This construction technology now requires us to reevaluate our conception of the realization and the look of architecture, since these means enable a degree of bespoke design that was previously impossible. Alongside the issue of the paradigm shift entailed by this evolution, a simple aesthetic question arises: will formal variation and uniqueness become the preferred mode as the economic rationale for repetition becomes obsolete? In this guidebook for "non-standard architecture," Kas Oosterhuis considers his own practice in the context of recent developments in the field of design and communication technologies. He focuses on two particular paradigm shifts: the movement from architecture based on mass production to architecture based on industrially produced made-to-measure components; and the related transition from a static architecture to a dynamic and interactive architecture.