GC: In a paper that I have recently published in Brazil (New technologies in building construction: bridging the gap between the creative process and CNC production. I talked about the connection between architecture offices and digital fabrication and the programming, and I suggested that there are three ways of doing it: with an in-house group, like the Specialist Modeling Group at Foster and Partners, which is only feasible in larger offices (Caroline Bos also said that they were starting to form their own group at UN Studio), then sometimes the fabrication company itself has its own team, like Bemo Systems, which has Peter Mehrtens communicating with and assisting architects, and then there are independent consultants like you, people who are in the middle of the process. Which one of these models you think works better, and would you, after all the difficulties that you just explained to me, like to engage in a large architecture office and be part of a team like Foster's Specialist Modeling Group?
MD: That is a complex question. Personally I would never do that, because I have experienced how it is to work for someone, or in big offices, and for me that is very inefficient. That's because you have work when a big project comes, but then you don't and need to do something else; you are not allowed to just go home, so it's very inefficient to work in a big machine like that, and this is why I decided I'm never going to work to anyone again, so I have my own company. The problem is that my work, as I described before, is very instable. There are forces from all sides and you have to jump out. You can only do this for a long time only with very good connections and friendships. On a free market you cannot do it. They try to get you out of the game. They try to do inside the office the things that you do. They try to form groups inside the offices, but they don't have people with the same expertise of me, who can program ten hours a day. But because I develop work for many offices I learn a lot and get much more experience. On the other side, architects still don't think they need this expertise, they think they can resolve it just with Grasshopper. That's why I turned to structural engineers, because they have problems that are extremely complex and there is not simplification. Three months from now they are coming with the concrete... with this kind of things people don't want to play, so they decide to hire me.
GC: As an architect, do you miss the design part of it?
MD: I do miss the design part, I love to design. If I could choose I would always work with architects, but they don't work with me as a consultant, only if I were an employee in their office, but this, in my experience, only works with connections and friendships, like I said. Because even myself, if I had an architectural office, I would not outsource. I would always simplify and do it myself.
GC: When you do the structural optimization do you also go into the detailing? This is also designing, but at a different level.
MD: I did not reach that level yet, in which people trust me to design it. I get the mathematical problem usually, with a set of rules that I have to solve: how to generate something automatically or how to optimize something. Then I rarely get to design something, because usually I work for companies that produce building components. When I come in the design phase is by far over. They know exactly what they want to do and they just want to automate the process.
GC: What about the fabrication process? Do you also prepare the documents for it?
MD: Yes, I'm doing it now. For this company Seele, they have their own production but they also outsource some production. They are in many countries, they are in Germany, Austria, UK, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, like 50 places. In Germany they are most famous for steel structure and glass. For example, they did the Apple cube in New York, and the glass stairs. Now I'm working in the Bloomberg building in London, generating some very complex geometry of its glass balustrades. They have to be held on the concrete, and there are thousands of steel elements that are unique. I had to program a set of tools to generate them, and at the end I'm basically delivering the files for the CNC machines and the blue prints with dimensions, which are theoretically not needed, but they need it for checking. I would like to concentrate more on that; this is something that they cannot do by themselves. In my experience nobody will askme to do something unless they cannot do it themselves. Life has told me that I need to do something that no one else can. I would like to be like those people that can get the work even if someone else can do it. But unfortunately this is because of my position, because I'm a foreigner, I have no connections. That's why I'm focusing on this extremely complex and precise stuff, which is CNC fabrication of complex elements and their optimization. A lot of people are working with parametric design with Grasshopper but that is another level, which is enough for the design process. My level (of programming) is only needed for more complicated stuff. The architects will say: "these don't need to be unique elements; let's make just 5 unique and then copy them". They can always simplify and then I'm not needed.
GC: Does Seele have specialists in CNC who work for them?
MD: Big companies do have specialists, but they come to me when their specialists don't have the level that is needed to solve a problem in some project. They hire better and better specialists and I always need to be better and better than them. But sometimes their specialists make mistakes, and unfortunately I get a lot of work when this happens. I would rather participate from the very beginning of the project so there are no mistakes. This would be much more efficient. I worked in a project that had free form façade elements; there were polygons with different shapes, many of them unique. They produced the individual CATIA files of each element with all their steel girders and details. They sent them to the company that was supposed to produce the elements, but all the elements were inserted in the origin point instead of in their actual location in the 3D model, and they were not sure if it would fit the geometry of the building. This could have been avoided with a very simple connection at the beginning, but because it wasn't done, I had to do it backwards. I developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that imported the CATIA files, recognized the geometry and put it back in place in 3D. Once I did it automatically for all the elements we actually found many errors. There was some mistake in the process, so I actually saved them money, but much more money could have been saved if I had worked for them for two hours in an earlier stage, instead of one month fixing it. And the project in which I'm working now in London has some similarities in these balustrades. These are not free form, though. They are generated by a mathematically described curve. In theory the elements should be similar, but the construction company already put some bearing steel that should not be moved, and has a weird random position, so I need to program the shape of the balustrade to fit the steel elements. But if they had called me from the beginning it would fit and there would be no extra work. So a lot of the work I do comes from other people's mistakes, and I wish I didn't have to do that, but then they would need to engage me from the beginning.
GC: There is all this discussion about performative architecture nowadays. Have you ever had to solve some multi-criteria problem in which, besides dealing with the structural optimization, you had to deal with other objective, such as energy performance?
MD: No, but I would really like to do it. It is possible, but no one ever asked me to do that, because I'm not included in the whole process. Only when people get stuck with a big problem they come to me to solve this specific part. Then I make an algorithm, solve it, and they continue on their own. I would really like to be involved in a design from the very beginning, so I could show them how efficient it can be. Right now the only way for me would be as an employee at some company, but I don't want to do this. It makes sense for those companies to have their in-house team and save money, but I have much more experience, I started very early, and I have worked in different problems. And I'm getting better by solving the problems that they cannot solve. They give me the hardest problems and when I solve them I get the best experience. They are making me better.
GC: But you have always been able to solve it?
MD: Yes, always! I often spend some sleepless night thinking "this is not solvable", or "geometrically not possible". At the end I always manage, but it is very stressful. I would like to make my work more stable, but the way to make it stable is to step into their area. Either I'm going into production, I connect with some small company that has a CNC machine, and then I go into competition with big companies, and say ok, you are a company of one thousand employees, your price is a million Euros to produce some element, but I offer it for a hundred thousand Euros. I believe that we people with programming expertise can do what big companies are doing without that expertise. Maybe also in the design phase. I could partner with some very small architectural office with only five people and tell them, look, we are going to enter this competition, but we are going to develop this algorithm that is going to design something that no one else can do. So we just have to think what we can do with it.
GC: What about architectural design competitions? Have you participated in any?
MD: I have this obsession about not losing my time. I have almost a fobia for losing time, and that's why I can barely allow myself to enter competitions. In order for me to do it it would have to be with some great idea, or with some architect coming to me and inspiring me and saying let's try to do this with some programming, but this never happened. Maybe it's because I don't have that much contact with architects, and it's hard to compete with big companies. They don't do competitions, they gamble. They do a probability game. They enter 20 competitions a month, they put some students to do the work, and they end up winning some of them. If I'm alone I cannot afford it, but this is how big companies grow.
