TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION FOR INFORMAL URBAN CONTEXTS

摘要

For a long time technological innovation in the building sector has been seen as strictly linked to industrial production and prefabrication. The great investment costs required for the start up of large-scale intervention make it difficult to spread similar approaches among less developed contexts. Some recent architecture designs, though still being realized with the help of performing and well developed enterprises, are characterized mainly by an innovative use of information. Not the employed machine or the transformed material constitutes the innovation but the way of assembling already available resources. Is it possible to use the weightlessness of information to bring virtuous impulses to realities that are cut of from technological innovation at the moment? The present paper is based on an analysis of different recent projects that seem to be characterized by their use of information as a resource. A special focus is given to lightweight structures, as there seem to be opportunities for direct feedback effects within the design and building process due to an intrinsic physical behavior of such systems. For single projects, specific aspects are investigated with a process of splitting up and remodeling through physical or digital models in order to dig out aspects that can be applied under different constellations in terms of local skills and material resources. A range of technological approaches, each of them with its specific environmental value, emerges with this method and can be evaluated. A special focus is given here on environmental transformations of informal contexts in developing countries.