During a three-day-long workshop at the PICNIC festival 2011 leading Dutch architects, designers and craftsmen experimented with historical crafts and digital fabrication. Combining ancient earth building techniques with computer generated design and fabrication created life-size architectural structures.
The current economic climate offers great opportunities for small-scale urban development. On the one hand, big industrial construction plans have been stalled. On the other hand, communities, designers and makers increasingly shape their own urban environment. Innovative tools like networked & democratized on- and offline planning mechanisms, the development of cheap and accessible 'file to factory' digital fabrication and low-tech ecological building techniques open new doors.
