Abstract
The Third Industrial revolution is a growing phenomenon characterized
by the diffusion of digital fabrication devices and the consequent democratization of
production. An alternative open-source fabrication ecosystem is gradually developing
and challenging the actual production logics and, as consequence, the social
organization. The discipline of architecture is a protagonist of this revolution. The
imminent diffusion of new productive systems, along with the development of
advanced software, allow new possibilities to connect the domains of design and
construction, and to realize components given a certain (algorithmic) description,
and to synthetically describe the physical environment and its behaviours within the
digital environment. The role of the designer in this phase is to extend the potential
of the CAD/CAM procedures, and re-appropriate the control in the design-toconstruction
process to once again engage in the actual manufacturing of building
construction and provide high performance, tailored architecture. The open network
of digital production supports new design collaborations and manufacturing logics
which are able to reconfigure the urban organization of the industrial system and the
interaction with citizens, as in the experimental planning of Fab City Barcelona.
The use of open-source software and hardware opens up new horizons for more
transparent and collaborative development of interventions at different scales and
throughout the various stages of the projects formation.

Keywords Digital fabrication Fab city Fab lab Open-source architecture
Peer production Third industrial revolution
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/about/chairman/hol/wmg_ptc_presentation.pdf