Fabrication Lab

It's been another strange year in the Fabrication Lab as we’ve continued to adapt to a life with limited opportunity for physical making. The Lab has sprouted numerous acrylic screens to allow people to continue manufacturing parts for themselves wherever possible, and much of the Lab has remained accessible to our students and staff, for much of the year. I’m very grateful to the Lab team for their extraordinary efforts made over the summer preparing the Lab for socially distanced making, and for their resilience shown throughout this last academic year keeping our show on the road as far as possible. The unusual challenges we’ve all faced have however prompted a great deal of innovation, and led us to some surprisingly effective solutions with learnings we’ll carry forward into the future. Our annual laser-based workshop for all first year Architecture BA and Architecture and Environmental Design BSc students took place this year in lockdown and hence entirely online. We transformed the requirement for physical making into one for more advanced digital modelling, and took the opportunity to teach animation and explore kinetic architecture. As we now all become increasingly adept and comfortable with communicating through the medium of video calls, the project opened up new opportunities for working together and for collaborating in studio groups. The workshop finished as usual with a public exhibition, online this time, but with the advantage that it remains available for all to see (fabricationlab. london/exhibition-kaw21). Quieter times have also given us the opportunity to further develop the Lab, both physically and online. We’ve turned our attention to a wide range of projects from refitting the workshops and the Lab Shop, to completing the Lab’s extensive Material Library, begun several years ago though a grant from the Quintin Hogg Trust. When we finally open our doors more fully in the future, it will be to much better equipped spaces, offering ever-increasing opportunities. And while we have been limited to remote working alone, we have embarked on a complete overhaul of the Lab’s web platform, including the publishing of many of our previous projects, the upgrading of all our online training and teaching resources, and the launch of a new virtual tour of the Lab (fabricationlab.london). I encourage you to take the virtual tour for now, and very much look forward to seeing you in person in the Lab soon.

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