Baroque Tendencies: The Making of Northcote House is at once a construction manual and a design manifesto — a detailed account of how digital fabrication tools, rarely deployed outside university laboratories, were used to build a strikingly expressive house in Melbourne's Northcote.
About This Book
Northcote House is not easily categorised. Its highly expressive form is both machinic and handcrafted, its visual language shockingly new yet strangely familiar — qualities that emerge directly from the digital fabrication methods its designers used to build it. Paul Loh and David Leggett, practitioners who operate at the intersection of architecture, academia, and making, argue that their mode of working — what they call ‘digital material practice’ — is neither pure theory nor conventional practice, but an engaged form of design research. This book documents that research in full: the techniques, the decisions, the construction logic, and the broader argument for what happens when computational design meets the building site.
Key Features
- 296 pages of documented fabrication processes, construction photography, and design drawings for Northcote House
- Authored by Professor Paul Loh and David Leggett, the designers and builders of Northcote House
- Published by Uro Publications, 2025
What You'll Discover
- How digital manufacturing tools — typically confined to university fabrication labs — were applied directly to residential construction on a standard building site
- The specific techniques Leggett and Loh developed to fabricate, assemble, and construct Northcote House, including their approach to material efficiency and spatial organisation
- The theoretical underpinning of ‘digital material practice’ as a mode of design research that operates between academic inquiry and built outcome
- Why the baroque — as a sensibility of surface, form, and excess — becomes a productive framework for understanding where computational design is taking architecture
About the Author
Professor Paul Loh is Head of the Abedian School of Architecture and lead coordinator of the Architecture Futures Laboratory at Bond University; previously he held senior roles at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, and has taught and lectured at institutions including the Architectural Association, ETH Zurich, Lund University, and Tsinghua University. David Leggett is a practising architect registered in Victoria and the UK, and former Director at Edward Cullinan Architects, where his projects included the Bristol Harbourside Masterplan, Singapore Management University, the International Digital Laboratory for the University of Warwick, and the Master Film Store for the British Film Institute.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 296
- Dimensions: 268mm x 204mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922601414
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Architects, digital fabrication researchers, architecture students, and design academics interested in the intersection of computational design, material practice, and residential construction.