Architecture, Fabrication, and Code

I studied architecture for years. It was a long education in how to hold several scales at once: a material detail, a room, a building, a neighbourhood, and the systems that make any of them possible.

Near the end of the degree, I started spending more time around digital fabrication and Fab Labs. I became involved with MakeSpace Madrid, a public-facing fabrication space where it was possible to move between an idea on a screen and something made by a machine. The distance between design and production felt smaller there.

Grasshopper was important because it was where I started programming seriously, even though I did not initially think of it as programming. I was building definitions that generated complex geometries and then writing my own modules when the existing ones were not enough. The interest was not in making a complicated shape for its own sake. It was in understanding the rules that could produce many different results.

That led me into a 3D-printing startup working with materials and extrusion. We experimented with concrete, Corian, and other materials that did not behave like the plastics most people associate with desktop 3D printing. It was an early period for the liberalisation of 3D printing, when the promise was still open enough to include buildings, furniture, tools, and strange prototypes that had no obvious market yet.

Architecture was giving me a way to think about systems. Digital fabrication gave those systems physical consequences. And code started appearing as the connective tissue between the two.

I was also becoming less interested in the conventional path that waited for me after the degree. Architect internships in Spain did not feel like the place where I wanted to keep learning. I wanted to stay closer to technology and to the possibility of building products.

That tension eventually took me towards Replit, before I had finished the degree. The architecture thesis came later, after Replit, but the shift had already started here.