Editorial: “Will digital architecture build follies or glories?“
THERE’S a winery outhouse in a field in Fläsch, Switzerland, that was built using robots and algorithms. Each one of its 20,000 bricks was laid at a precise angle and interval – by a robot arm. One hour away, in the town of Pfungen, the twisting brick facade of an office building has the same algorithmic origins. These are arguably the world’s first digital constructions in which computer designs have become a large-scale structural reality thanks to automated machine labour.
The outhouse and the office were built by , a company spun out from by architect-cum-roboticist Tobias Bonwetsch. ROB has developed a mobile robotic construction platform (pictured above) which can be wheeled to any construction site, where it spits out customised brickwork. The bricks are laid according to any design chosen in the customised software which underpins the system. A robotic arm made by Kuka Robotics based in Augsburg, Germany, grabs each brick off a slide, daubs it with sticky epoxy resin and lays it with superhuman precision. The robot means designers can experiment with mathematically complex designs, knowing that every brick will be effortlessly, perfectly placed.
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“We do things with the robot that would never have been done in a traditional, manual way,” Bonwetsch says. “As soon as every brick must be positioned differently, it’s very hard for a builder. But the robot doesn’t care.”
Swiss construction company has given ROB more than half a million Swiss francs ($540,000) to develop its bricklaying robot. Upcoming projects include a robot-built wooden slat ceiling and a 3500-square-metre brick facade – Bonwetsch’s biggest project yet. A robot that could handle the tiling of a whole room with the same level of autonomy as a Roomba vacuum cleaner is also on the list.
Meanwhile, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, robo-arms and design software are being unleashed to create a whole house. Steven Keating at the MIT Media Lab took delivery of a truck with a 15-metre-long boom-arm last week. That vehicle is now being transformed into a giant robotic print head, capable of 3D-printing building-sized versions of the curvaceous mini-structures that festoon Keating’s office. “No one has ever built a robotic arm this large,” he claims. “Our end goal is a digital construction vehicle which would allow what we call print-in-place construction.” In other words, a system that can drive onto a construction site and automatically print a completely unique building directly from digital designs.
“Our end goal is a digital construction vehicle which would allow print-in-place construction”
While Bonwetsch has succeeded in bringing digital construction to an industry niche, Keating is aiming to revolutionise the way we build. Printing concrete directly is restrictive, as only very specific mixtures of concrete are any good for being squeezed through a nozzle.
Instead, Keating is bringing software and robotics to an idea first tried by US inventor Thomas Edison in the early 20th century: . Edison used a wooden mould to pour concrete into the shape of a house, peeling the wood away to reuse once the house had dried. Sadly, the wooden mould tended to break under the strain, and with 2300 pieces was far too complex for normal use. The venture failed, although not before Edison successfully poured two concrete houses, one of which .
Keating uses a Kuka robotic arm that extrudes a fast drying foam to make any shape of mould he wants. The foam, which expands by 10 times its volume after extrusion, is squirted out in two parallel layers, and the robot inserts reinforcing steel rods across the structure as it goes. Concrete is then poured into the cavity between these two foam walls, like a concrete sandwich, and the outer foam surfaces are finished into insulative inner and outer linings of the house.
That same Kuka arm will soon be mounted at the tip of the huge boom on Keating’s new truck. One of the biggest challenges will be ensuring that vibrations caused by wind do not interfere with the printing, so the lab is working on a control system that will adjust the Kuka arm to compensate.
Keating also foresees battalions of smaller robots swarming over a building site like termites, coordinating their actions wirelessly to build a complete house. He has already designed a basic prototype swarm-bot, which can drive along the top of the foam walls, extruding new material behind it to build up the structure.
The Swiss start-up and MIT’s Media Lab are far from going it alone. Architecture firms around the world are bringing in their own Kuka robotic arms to experiment with digital construction. Engineering firm Laing O’Rourke recently started Project Freefab, a low-key step towards bringing printing and robotics into mainstream construction. James Gardiner, who leads the project and is based in Sydney, Australia, says the direct printing which he and Keating are exploring will open up a whole array of opportunities in construction. The easy ability to conjure up novel geometry is a huge deal, he says. “You could print a design which funnels air into a building for efficient cooling, or to be thicker on the side which gets the most sun and heats up, or to channel water into the structure.”
Laing O’Rourke’s first stab at digital construction uses a robotically printed wax mould to turn out concrete forms in a method similar to Keating’s, but the wax can be melted down and remoulded after the concrete has set. The company is set to at its $200-million concrete pre-casting factory in Nottingham, UK.
Buildings are unlike any other product: they cannot be mass produced. “There’s a reason construction is the way it is,” says Bonwetsch. “Each building is a prototype, built on different sites and conditions for different clients, so it’s hard to standardise. But that’s the good thing about the robot – it’s a very flexible machine.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Robo-builders deliver architects’ dreams”
