Baroque Tendencies: The Making of Northcote House

“This is a book about art, passion and craft ... It gives a profound behind-the-scenes, even outtakes, view of how to make—and how to design through making.”
—Jane Burry

Northcote House is a strikingly singular building. Designed and built by David Leggett and Paul Loh—two design practitioners who operate in a fertile confluence between architecture, academia and fabrication—it represents a grand experiment in using digital manufacturing tools to transform the art and craft of construction. Both machinic and handcrafted, shockingly new and yet strangely familiar, Northcote House’s highly expressive, almost baroque form is the product of these tools, which rarely, if ever, make it outside university fabrication laboratories onto building sites.

Baroque Tendencies explores how and why this house came to be. It is a manual and a manifesto. A ‘How-to of Digital Fabrication’, it details the novel techniques Leggett and Loh used to fabricate, construct and assemble the house. In the process, it shows how this blend of conventional construction practice with digital fabrication achieves efficiencies in material use, spatial organisation and positive environmental impacts.

Leggett and Loh argue that their particular mode of design and construction, what they call ‘digital material practice’, is neither theory nor practice, but rather an engaged form of design research. In this book, they share the knowledge they have gleaned from their work with practitioners, architecture students and anyone interested in how architecture has taken an unexpected turn towards the baroque.