Larry Sass Lecture

Larry Sass is an assistant professor at MIT who focuses on research and the advancement of digital fabrication processes. His main design interest is described as designing and constructing culturally sensitive community based buildings. He is anti-factory in production, advocates a no-paper design environment, and a user of low energy techniques. He effectively puts technique above style for the purposes of his research.

One of his major research questions is determining if participatory design work is possible. Can people without sufficient knowledge and training utilize a medium with which to make design decisions? He seeks to make such interaction possible and feels that such technology will be more prominent in the near future.

Sustainability is amongst his chief interests in design. He feels that a green economy is not possible with old homes. This leads his research to the fabrication of brand new, sustainable designs to the exclusion of the modification of existing buildings to meet more societal responsible requirements.

Error is prefabrication’s greatest weakness and one Sass goes to great lengths to conquer. Error can necessitate additional hand based manufacturing, high energy factory fabrication and delivery, and imprecise, low quality products. As an anti-factory designer who seeks to ideally do without power tools on the job site, Sass relies on digital printing and laser cutting techniques to shape materials almost exclusively. This eliminates an enormous amount of error in communication and shaping by hand. He uses materialization, which he defines as the creation of geometries for manufacturing from CAD data, to make this possible.

His techniques are pretty remarkable. He uses no fasteners and minimal glue in the creation of his buildings, which are held together primarily by friction. Interestingly enough, these buildings are sufficiently stable. Erecting such designs is essentially like the assembly of a three-dimensional puzzle. This requires minimal skill and equipment usage on behalf of the builders, whom Sass drafts amongst his likely inexperienced students who still more than capable of putting together such projects.

Overall, Larry Sass is utilizing thought provoking methods that are beneficial to architectural design as a whole. Though his focus on sustainable, participatory, and ultimately low-cost design seems narrow minded as his products lack similarly thought provoking modern special design, his work is remarkable. He is setting a precedent for other designers to take these techniques and utilize them in addition with what equates to more architecturally interesting endeavors. Give him a break for implementing his techniques with a traditional shotgun house; focusing on his lack of attention towards spatial design is missing the point.