In the past few decades,Digital Designhas madesignificant evolvement, although people may claim it is still in its infancy. The expanded array of digital design methods and fabrication technologies has become more integrated, fluent and available. In many ways, digital technologiesare right now on the brink of changing the process of design and the construction in architecture, bringing in much further degrees of dimension and newer level of resolution. What is currently going on will, so is steel and concrete have changed the 20th century design fundamentally, change how design is conceived andprocessed, not to mention how people will come to understand architecture.
Moreover, all these evolvements are not simply technology-based issues, but more becoming the issue of intuitive sensitivity achieved through technology.
ETH CAAD, one of few institutions which lead the world in computational design and digital fabrication, and NCTU IAR, also one of few institutes pioneering the field in Asia, has held a joint workshop “Teahouse 2.0” in the Spring of 2012, which explore a new threshold of computational design and digital fabrication in the realm of education. The workshop is themed as “Teahouse 2.0” as interest and respect on something beyond technology, such as local tradition, temporality, and avant-garde-ness, also as seeking new possibility of digitally aided design. This exhibition shows the result of the workshop – 3 teams from NCTU IAR and ETH CAAD designed and built 3 experimental “Teahouses” taking advantage of digital technologies – and recent project of educational activities of each school. Through examples of process and result of actual materialization of digitally designed artifacts, visitor shall be able to sense what is really happening in, and fundamentally changing the world of architectural design.