With commands like “extrude”, “trim”, “revolve” and “array”, contemporary CAD software contains analogues to the machine processes and abundances of industrial mass-production. This produces an affinity in the designer towards the predictable surface of standardized building materials. Furthermore, by instantiating geometry that was not there before with minimal apparent effort or cost, such software obscures the extraction, processing, transportation and waste necessary to physically realize said geometry. This suggests that the only limits on the material world are processing power and file storage capacity, which poses a challenge as it becomes increasingly apparent that circular construction practices are key to minimizing the deleterious environmental impacts of construction.

Medium Resolution presents an alternative form of CAD called Inventory, which is based on digital (or medium resolution) representations of specific pieces of material and processes for fabricating assemblies of parts. Inventory is an open-ended platform for making architecture out of stuff.

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