A stereotomic approach to regional digital architecture

Abstract

Maltese traditional cultural landscape emerged from three dominant contextual realities: limited resources, the limestone as the single available building material, and a geographic discontinuity. The recently increased geopolitical connectivity has negated Malta's geographic isolation and instigated an unprecedented influx of investments, clients, users, and services. Due to high urbanisation, Malta can be equated with a small European city, yet its operations have neither environs nor a surrounding region to rely on. The result is a persistent speculative building boom dependent on imported technology and materials that are uncritically streamlined towards the economy of design and production. The established limited material palette and fixed, Modernist-like construction procedures bound the contemporary architectural practice within a highly restrictive design space, directly opposite to the long-lasting ability of vernacular and traditional architectural practices to continuously expand through assimilations of the tangible and intangible goods. Stereotomy, the initial point of the research, is recognised as a historical reference that offers a way to expand limitations of the current dominant design thinking towards more contextually responsive architecture. Stereotomy is approached beyond its immediate definition as the stonecutting discipline for executing geometrically complex masonry assemblies that ties it to specific material and construction choices. Instead, it is recognised as a material system formulated through a systemic approach to the context that establishes bottom-up, computational processes that discretise and externalise its multiple constraints as a material system of interdependent geometric. In short, the research exposes the stereotomic design process as contextual structuring and stereotomy as a digital architecture. From this theoretical perspective, the research theorises the notion of regional digital architectural practice as an architectural practice grounded in a systemic approach to the context that guides its thinking, design, and production. The notion becomes the theoretical framework of Maltese contextual analysis that recognises the traditional cultural landscape as a material system and its contextual authenticity as derived from the architectural formation of structuring the context. Finally, regional digital architectural practice lends itself as an open-ended methodology for teaching architecture, tested within several study-unit seminars and research projects and Design Workshops tutorials. Here, the context is approached not as a collection of forms but topologically continuous capacities and constraints.