International Journal of Architecture, Arts and Applications

Special Issue

From Hard Architecture to Digital Fabrication

  • Submission Deadline: Nov. 30, 2017
  • Status: Submission Closed
  • Lead Guest Editor: Mohamed Alaa Mandour
About This Special Issue
On a computer screen, forms seem to drift freely, without restraint other than those imparted by the program and by the designer’s imagination. There is something deeply unsettling in this apparent freedom that seems to question our most fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of the architectural discipline.
In the present day digital architecture accentuates vibrant surface, with its three-dimensional curves, and the interior and exterior fluidity of its topological spaces. This is all quite different from the spatial form produced by conventional tectonics scene, making it impossible to explain these new designs within the field of traditional architecture.
Design in architecture has been affected by computer. When 3D models, animation, simulation, deformation and other computer based techniques are used in the design process, this allows the designer to have greater control over the management of the product design. And when using a computer, a designer can transform material objects into dematerialized objects through digital imagery manipulation. This can produce substantial changes in effect.
What was originally a concrete, static state of expression with specific characteristics can be changed dramatically with the aid of computers. For example, such things as distortions, explosions, copying, etc, can be expressed in this manner. Fixed, cognitive expression of architecture is no longer important. By using computer software, special, logical manipulation of design can be achieved. The new era of technology wants to tug us towards a post-digital design-making maturity where design purpose, computational abstraction and automated fabrication and assembly are positioned more as the norm than as the exception within a shifting set of design paradigm.
This special issue discusses the process of manipulating design by computer can be viewed as digital presentation and its display of digital design thinking. The expression of knowledge relative to the technique and mechanism of the process of digital architecture production proves that digital practice is not just a tool for design, but is also a medium for stimulating thinking in the realm of design, a means of fabricating the logic behind even more complex forms.

Aims and Scope:
Paradigm Shift from Traditional Designs to Digital Era
Evolutions and Transformations of New Architecture
Virtual Versus the Real
Emergent Future Dimensions
Vibrant Surface
Digital Tectonics
Digital Design Thinking
Lead Guest Editor
  • Mohamed Alaa Mandour

    Arcitecture and Planning Department, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt