Future Wood exhibition
September 28 - October 14, 2007
Exhibition room, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Dalhousie University
Good design is a key to productivity, innovation, and sustainability. It is a critical competitive advantage in the 21st Century. The projects included in the Future Wood exhibition illustrate the integration of digital modeling and fabrication techniques into design, manufacturing, and construction processes and foregrounds the importance of design in today's culture and economy.
Moving from design concepts to actual objects or environments, the projects in the exhibit explore how digital fabrication can be integrated with existing design practices to improve the productivity and efficiency of construction and manufacturing. Digital fabrication tools such as CNC beam processors, CNC routers, laser cutters, and 3-D printers provide a direct link between the CAD modeling and the physical output. In wood design and building, digital fabrication tools enable the fabrication of complex designs while promoting the evolution of traditional wood building methods and techniques central to the building culture and economy in British Columbia and elsewhere.
The exhibition is funded by the Canadian Design Research Network (CDRN) with support from BC Wood Works! and the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The Future Wood projects illustrate correlations between academic research on complex systems with industrial and market applications of digital wood fabrication technologies. As such, the projects highlight commonalities in the development of digital media used in design research and applied fabrication technologies.