Starrett Lehigh Building, New York City
The Diller Scofido + Renfro workshop is located on a mezzanine level inside the thickness of huge, inhabitable trusses that strengthened the floor above, allowing it to support railroad freight cars when the building was in use as a dock-side transshipment hub. The shop is divided into a “clean” zone for building models and working on large layouts and a “dirty” zone for wood and metalworking with heavier, dust-producing tools. The clean side of the shop also houses a laser cutter and a rapid prototyping system.
As part of the office expanding into new space and beginning a new phase, the design of the shop was taken as an opportunity to think about the role that material production does and could potentially play in architectural practice. Though it arrived at simple results, the design of the shop developed from a series of discussions about the production of models and mock-ups in relation to design and construction processes, the roles of digital and more conventional fabrication techniques and the potentials and limitations of design/build work. The shop is primarily an organizational design project — a system of people and tools that work together as a larger, social machine for making architecture.
