Established at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in 2011, and after tours to ETH Zurich in 2014 and ICD/ITKE Stuttgart in 2017, the fourth triennial FABRICATE conference is being held online from 09 – 12 September 2020. Co-hosted by two UCL Faculties, The Bartlett, and UCL Engineering, FABRICATE 2020 is co-chaired by two world-leading experts in the field; Professor Jenny Sabin of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in Ithaca, New York, and Professor Jane Burry, Dean at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

The conference is accompanied by a 320-page hardback publication (UCL Press, 2020), featuring 32 lavishly illustrated articles on built projects and constructed prototypes from over 100 contributors (selected from over 250 submissions and peer-reviewed by over 50 experts). With four additional interviews between keynotes and academic and industry experts, the book brings together the latest global expertise in architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation, as the fourth accompaniment in the series which to-date have been downloaded over 135,000 times via the UCL Press website here.

Held over four days, the online conference explored the overarching theme of Making Resilient Architecture across twenty presentations preceded by four keynote addresses from Julia Barfield (Marks Barfield Architects) and Kai Strehlke (Blumer Lehmann), Cristiano Ceccato (Zaha Hadid Architects), Philippe Block (ETH, Switzerland) and Meejin Yoon (Cornell University), each of which speaks to a critical and resonant theme:

– Bio-Materiality
– Synthesising design and production
– Optimisation for a Changing World
– Polemical Performative Practice

The conference brought together expertise from across the world, with speakers from 10 countries, including researchers from UCL, ETH Zurich, ICD/ITKE Stuttgart, CITA, IaaC, AAP and practitioners from AKT II, Foster and Partners, Heatherwick Studio, SHoP Architects, Matsys, Design-to-production, with industry partners AUTODESK, Arup, Happold Foundation, Perkins & Will, Boston Dynamics, to name a few.

From computational design, to material performance and manipulation, to robotic fabrication, FABRICATE promotes the full spectrum of research and creative practice currently occurring within Architecture & Engineering.

Our Call for Work was open for submissions of built or partially built projects by individuals or collaborators in academia, practice and industry. We welcomed submissions that examine how the latest digital design and fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, and the many novel techniques being developed to bridge the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realisation.

We received over 220 submissions of exceptional quality from 37 countries. The submissions were reviewed by a panel of experts and 32 projects are accepted for the FABRICATE publication, 20 of which will be presented live at the conference.