Opening: 7.30 pm
Opening hours: 2.00-7.00 pm
Finissage: 03.04., 4.00 pm

The exhibition shows the results of the work carried out during the JOYN residency 2021, a project hosted by studio milz and funded by the ministry of culture of Chile. This first version of the residency program asks how new building technologies could help to imagine alternative ways of producing our built environment. In this specific case, the technology is the JOYN MACHINE.

JOYN MACHINE
The JOYN MACHINE, developed by studio milz, follows an “all-in-one concept” covering the entire production chain from designing a wooden structure to manufacturing the parts that can get assembled into the designed wood structure afterward. The idea of providing one process that combines all these skills was achieved by closely linking software and hardware components to one fluently working process. With a weight of about 100 kg, the JOYN MACHINE is portable. At the core, it is a three-axis milling machine with a rolling conveyor for positioning wooden slats, including mechatronics like automatic slat calibration. In practice, the user feeds a wooden slat to the machine, which does all the rest automatically.

The JOYN MACHINE has been used by studio milz to build various exhibitions such as the Digital Arts Lab (2019), Beyond Bauhaus (2019) and the Futurium Pavillion (2018).

The exhibition
In the contemporary construction industry, digitally fabricated wooden structures require highly technical and infrastructure-heavy processes. For this reason and the involved costs, they are limited to large-scale projects.

The JOYN MACHINE, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly method for the design and manufacturing of lightweight wooden structures regardless of their complexity and size. The residency project tries to imagine a world in which innovative tools like this could address infrastructure needs in a local and sustainable way, creating an experimental vision that investigates how parts of our built environment could be produced in the future.

The exhibition shows four constructions that loosely deal with problems commonly encountered in the architectural design process: Statics, balance, order, and the inherent building “language” derived from the limitations of the constructive system. These four constructions are self-contained spatial configurations that have no site or client. They are speculative explorations of type and use. Further, some of them do interact with a second material. These brief interactions point to the endless possibilities to expand the method of the used system. 

Instead of suggesting a definitive building prototype, the four models are open-ended and adaptable, leaving space for imagination.

studio milz
At the intersection of design, architecture, and research, studio milz, founded by Simon Deeg and Andreas Picker, develops bespoke spatial projects, immersive experiences, and participatory interventions with a strong focus on human-centered design. An interdisciplinary approach and the tension between the physical and the digital world are the trademarks of the studios‘ work. Whether it is exhibition design, spatial furniture, or temporary architectural constructions, the studio combines sustainability and circular use of resources with a unique artistic sensitivity for materials and aesthetics.

Pedro Serrano studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, graduating in 2016. He has since worked in different architecture offices, developed private commissions, and completed collaborations with artists. His focus is on alternative modes of practice in construction and design.