This panel discussion will celebrate the publication of a new book called “Homing the Machine in Architecture.” This edited collection is a series of conversations on the ways designers, practitioners, historians, and theorists orient themselves within the world of architectural digital fabrication.

The panel will feature three of the book’s contributors—Michael Szivos, Shelby Doyle, and Marshall Prado— and will be moderated by the book’s editors, Zach Cohen and Galo Canizares.

To “home” a digital fabrication machine is to send it back to its origin point—a point that can be specified by the fabricator in advance of the fabrication process or by the defaults that are pre-programmed into the machine. The homing process is necessary and productive since it determines the physical point at which the machine (and the maker) begin making—every time that architectural designers begin to digitally fabricate something new, they first need to home the machine. “Homing the Machine in Architecture” gathers first- and second-hand accounts of the origins of individual “digi-fab” practices from the emergence of advanced prototyping tools to the contemporary moment. It features interviews, essays, and case studies organized around three questions: What are the possible histories of digital fabrication in architecture? How do designers orient themselves in this emergent discipline? What conceptual original points do architectural designers return to when they home their machines?

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