Sensibility at Large

The irreversible imprint of humankind on Earth calls for revisiting current construction practices. This paper forwards a vision for post-Anthropocene, large-scale, architectural, and landscape construction. This vision relates to transforming natural terrains into architecture using on-site robotic tools and enabling greater sustainability through increased sensibility. Despite advancements in large-scale digital fabrication in architecture, the field still mainly focuses on the production of objects. The proposed vision aims to advance theory and practice towards territorial scale digital fabrication of environments. Three notions are proposed: Material-aware construction, large-scale customization, and integrated fabrication. These aspects are demonstrated through research and teaching projects. Using scale models, they explore the deployment of robotic tools toward reforming, stabilizing, and reconstituting soil in an architectural context. Together, they propose a theoretical ground for in situ digital fabrication for a new era, relinking architecture to the terrains upon which it is formed.