A Historical Perspective to Fabrication in Architecture for Preserving Heritage

Digital technologies have recently been at the forefront of the causal link between making and design. A growing number of architecture programs of universities incorporates fabrication to the educational environment, and even to the curriculum. Fabrication technology is now considered among the set of tools students are expected to acquire a basic knowledge of and skills in. Nevertheless, the pedagogical potential of fabrication in communicating traditions of making is underused in an oversight of the continuity of the relevant know-how. Our position is that traditions of making can be the subject matter of fabrication with the objective to remedy the role of fabrication tools in architectural history, sustainable architectural production, and in the field of digital heritage. In this paper, we report on two comparative studies that illustrate how the instrumental factors of two historical crafts can be articulated using fabrication.