Coming soon(ish) to New York, the “East Side Access”! Set to open in 2019, the $7 billion project is one the greatest infrastructural works currently underway in urban America. Every day for nearly seven years now, giant machines and teams of workers buried deep in the ground excavate tunnels through Manhattan’s bedrock core. These tunnels will house the future trains that will traverse the length of the new Long Island Railroad (LIRR) line, connecting Sunnyside, Queens, to Grand Central Terminal. At peak times, the line will route 24 trains per hour and ferry 162,000 trips in both directions.

At present, 5.6 miles of tunnel have already been dug. The MTA recently posted images of the construction progress, which finds workers toiling away in a giant crater beneath Grand Central. This cavernous space will be home to a large platform that will terminate the line. Click through for all the photos!

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Architizer is hosting the world’s definitive architectural awards program, with 50+ categories and 200+ jurors. As part of an ongoing series, we’re spotlighting projects that fit into “Plus” categories, including “Fabrication,” that tap into topical and culturally relevant themes. To see a full list of categories and learn more about the awards, visit architizerawards.com.

Don’t let the flashy renderings fool you. The future of architecture lay not so much in novel forms as in new methods of digital fabrication. In an age of rapidly diminishing resources, architects must develop, together with research laboratories, tech leaders, and software designers, efficient construction models that make more with less. This will require new types of mechanical and robotic armatures, which prove more nimble, accurate, and thus, efficient at building both complex and simple structures, to put those new model into practice. The goal is to put all of these ingenious ideas to the test, and develop the best for widespread application at every scale.

Fabrication innovations have thoroughly and irrevocable changed the making of architecture, and architects should welcome that change. That just doesn’t mean corporate designers like Foster + Associates that have now have robotic and digital fabrication wings, but also smaller firms that are responsible for the majority of building. These techniques and machines should be made available and affordable to every kind of architect, and not exclusively licensed to the larger firms. Here’s to hoping for an office robot arm!

Click on through for self-building architecture, giant 3D printers, blood bricks, and of course, robots, robots, robots.

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Machine Drawing Drawing Machines from Pablo Garcia on Vimeo.

Picasso may have considered the computer useless, but he never saw how one could draw. “Machine Drawing Drawing Machines” explores a CNC machine’s illustrative capabilities through a series of facsimile drawings depicting twelve historical drawing machines. Each of the images represents a canonical device that introduced a technological shift in the way we observe the world and its contents. From Albrecht Dürer’s “Dürer’s Door” (1525) and Sir Robert Hooke’s Portable “Picture Box” Camera Obscura (1694) to the Drum Plotter “560″ (1959), the new prints cover the gamut of amazing, manmade machines that function(ed) both as an extension of ourselves and also as an autonomous being seemingly capable of its own intuitions and insights.

Devised by Pittsburgh-based artist Pablo Garcia, the project ironically highlights the possibility and obsolescence inherent in all machinery, with the CNC router effortlessly scrawling the painstaking detail hard-won by its precedents. The prints are available in a limited 4-edition set, which can be purchased through the artist here.

“Dürer’s Door”, Albrecht Dürer, 1525

Profile Machine, Carl Augustus Schmalcalder, 1806

[via Geek]

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Upon seeing Jacques de Vaucanson’s infamous shitting duck (“Canard Digérateur”), Voltaire proclaimed the inventor to be the “new Prometheus,” a veritable creator of novel inorganic, i.e. mechanical, forms of life. The duck convincingly simulated bodily movements, such as craning its neck and drinking water through its beak, but was, in fact, neither capable of digestion nor defecation. Despite this, the mythic aura surrounding Vaucanson’s animal resonated with the culture’s fascination with the philosophical implications and technological promise of Cartesian automata.

To some extent, Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures, the “Strandbreests,” are the progeny of Vaucanson’s and Descartes’ machines. Upon first inspection, Jansen’s creatures, which are made of yellow PVC tubing laced with electric “feelers” operated by a primitive computing system, seem less than far removed from the 18th-century technology that made possible the automated duck. Jansen’s insistence on the binomial nomenclature with which he taxonomizes his creations too recalls the hybrid rationalism of the Enlightenment period. The artist engineer even goes so far as to  empathize with the biblical Creator, who, in Jansen’s story, has had millions of years of evolutionary activity to develop his work; given the same time, Jansen says, he too would produce a more perfect array of organisms. As it is, he has accrued just 21 years of experience building his wind-powered animals–needless to say, just an infinitesimal blip on the cosmic temporal radar. But he has recently embraced 3d-printing technology as a means of ensuring the reproductive future of his animal species. Read on.

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In what will resemble a scene from any post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie, albeit in miniature, a fleet of flying robots will lift into place 1,500 polystyrene foam bricks to construct a 6-meter tall, 3.5-meter wide structure. The installation, programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, will begin December 2, with construction running through February 19, at which point the stabilized helicopters would have built the undulating tower pictured below. According to the architects, the work, entitled ‘Flight Assembled Architecture,’ will address “radical new ways of thinking and materializing architecture as a physical process of dynamic formation,” with a theoretical goal of scaling up the choppers and equipping them with GPS to assemble future megastructures.

[via BLDGBLOG]

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Machines such as 3D printers, CNC routers, and robot arms are changing our conceptions about production, bringing about a new industrial paradigm of mass customization. Such a dramatic change will propel all designers to be actively involved in the making of new tools, lest they risk being overtaken by techies, corporations, and zealous DIYers. But that’s beside the point. WikiHouse, a new Open Community project that hosts open-source home designs, should benefit all parties involved. Details after the jump!

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