An Atlas of Fabrication

An Atlas of Fabrication celebrates the commitment to material research that informs the buildings and teaching of Frank Barkow and Regine Leibinger, who were AA unit masters in the late 1990s. The practice's fascination with machine-tool fabrication began academically but now resonates in all ongoing building projects within the practice.

This publication accompanies an exhibition at the Architectural Association from 27 February to 27 March 2009. The exhibition shows how the work favours a material architecture, guided by a conviction that architectural ideas and materials are inextricably intertwined. Put another way, architecture is a physical substance, and the point of conceptualisation is to figure out how to treat that material. It is a practice that embraces the factory, where an ongoing dialogue is established with the industries that make the machines and people who operate them. This knowledge informs the work and frees it from the standard building catalogue.