This is a call for the development of a more robust theoretical position about the gender implications of advanced parametric design and the use of machines to design and fabricate architecture. As digital fabrication has made material the network conditions of cyberfeminism, it is time to revisit the relationships between feminism, architecture, and technology. We propose a framework that relies upon intellectual traditions of feminism and deliberately focuses on developing technologies as a locus of power and influence in architecture. Architecture has been slow to fully acknowledge, incorporate, and integrate women into its practices.3 Within the building profession, digital technology has emerged—and in many ways, is still emerging—as a site of architectural influence: those who control the process of design through technology control architecture. CNC fabrication and robotic construction are cultivating new cultures of digital craft, and in searching for future opportunities, we would do well to recall the long history that links craft and feminine labor. By looking again at the often-neglected contributions of Ada Lovelace and the Jacquard loom to computation and digital fabrication in the nineteenth century or a more recent project such as the Elytra Filament Pavilion, we might see how this digital moment has been framed by feminist craft rather than the more familiar origin stories that surround computation.

“The problem with a tent is that when you use it you throw it away, so it’s money that melts.”–Alejandro Aravena

The social project of architecture has long been fascinated with emergency and refugee housing as a primary unit of architectural and urban development. For decades, architects have proposed alternatives to the United Nations’ blue tent cities that are the principal image associated with humanitarian aid and its resulting urbanism. During the 2016 Venice Biennale Reporting from the Front, curator Alejandro Aravena challenges architects to reconsider the discipline’s relationship to society’s most urgent challenges. The ongoing European refugee crisis is one such ‘Front’ and this research examines the viability of an alternative to the polyvinylchloride (PVC) tarp as the default condition of emergency and refugee housing. The authors propose that waterproof paper surfaces and members, treated with a proprietary nano-coating can perform as well as traditional materials, but with reduced environmental impact and improved user comfort. A collaboration between researchers in Material Science and Architecture combines ongoing scientific research with digital design tools and methods. Following is a brief history of building with paper, an introduction to hydrophobic nano-coatings, and several fabricated prototypes. This project expands upon initial applications from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2012) where researchers successfully prepared paper surfaces with a nanoparticle coating, repelling water and maintaining structural integrity.